Manny Pacquiao & Miranda Cosgrove Demo Favorite Features of New HP Veer Smartphone.

In 'Never Underestimate The Little Guy' and 'Miranda Cosgrove' for the HP Veer webOS smartphone, crowd pleasers Manny Pacquiao and Miranda Cosgrove demo the product's features as only they can do. Manny, an eight-division boxing world champion with 10 world titles, uses HP Veer's mobile internet and apps to make training easy anywhere, while Miranda uses them to keep her tied-in to fans, friends and family while she's on the road touring. The spots are created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, directed by Harvest's Baker Smith and David Nutter, respectively, with VFX from The Mill.

Sarah Eim and Becky Porter, our VFX supervisors and lead artists on the spots, explain that The Mill created the screen graphics with GS&P and HP while the product was still in development; this helped maintain product accuracy. They were also involved early on in production, working with director Baker Smith shooting tests of the product on the ARRI Alexa then adding in screen content to help visualize how the final shots would look.

Eim and Porter say hiding Manny and Miranda's faces with the small HP Veer phone proved tricky. To mitigate the challenges, Smith and his production team created a rig to hold the phone (with post removal in mind), thus preventing the talent from exposing their faces. Later in post, The Mill's team referenced the movement of the original unrigged tests to add a more natural drift to the rigged phone.

"The agency and editorial company worked hard to balance the product and the talent within the spot," Porter says. "The challenge was to make the stories engaging with the talent hidden. The viewer enjoys the knowledge of who the celebrity is for the visual and audio clues, and has the pay off be the final reveal of Manny or Miranda."

"As is often the case, our schedule was tight," Eim adds. "But it was great to be involved by the agency and the directors from the start. This made it possible for everything to come together seamlessly at the end."