You may not have noticed, but there was actually a football game being played between commercials. For some time now, the Super Bowl has become the place for companies to buy expensive airtime for costly commercials, in the hopes of building better awareness for their brand. You may have had your favorites, but we've got some great behind the scenes videos for some of the biggest commercials that played during the game — even some controversial ones.

Nationwide — Make Safe Happen

This is the one that got everyone talking after the game, but if you haven't seen it, check out this rather morbid Nationwide spot:

And here's the behind the scenes, which shows footage from set, as well as pre-production where they settle on the idea and explain their rationale:

Nationwide — Invisible Mindy Kaling

That wasn't Nationwide's only commercial, however, they also had one with Mindy Kaling:

Budweiser — Lost Dog

Bud Light — Real Life PacMan #UpForWhatever

Nissan — With Dad

BMW i3 — Newfangled Idea

Loctite Glue — Positive Feelings

There is a terrific set of videos going behind the scenes for this Loctite spot, but they are only available at Ad Age. You can watch a teaser here:

Snickers — The Brady Bunch

Fxguide recently took a look at two Super Bowl commercials that required quite a bit of VFX, and besides their terrific write-up, there are some fantastic BTS videos of both the Snickers and Mercedes-Benz spots. First up is Snickers, produced by BBDO New York, O Positive, and The Mill (the full commercial is at the end of the BTS):

The new footage was shot on the ARRI ALEXA with some Canon 5Ds for reference, and in order to make it match with the original Brady Bunch footage, they needed to do quite a bit of denoising and cleaning up, and then added their own grain on top to make it all match.

Mercedes-Benz — Fable

Produced by RSA and directed by Robert Stromberg for the agency Merkley & Partners (with MPC doing VFX), here is the Mercedes-Benz commercial featuring the tortoise and the hare:

And the behind the scenes video:

A little bit about the production:

“Robert always wanted to shoot as many backgrounds for real and use that as the basis for us to work into,” notes creative director and 2D lead Alex Lovejoy. “So we knew it would be shot in the forest, with enhancement later. We spent four days on the shoot in two locations in Portland, Oregon for all the background plates. There were a few shots as well that were all digital from elements library and matte paintings.”

For more on the VFX for these two, check out the fxguide post here.

Source: fxguide