Sheridan grads bring Pac Man to life

A scene of Pac Man being chased by the ghosts Pinky, Inky, Blinky and Clyde inside a life-sized maze during a real game of Pac Man.

Sheridan graduate Marty Cochrane, a BlackTrax product manager behind the scenes on the set of Pac Man.

STORY BY ELISE MORTON
PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM MCDANIEL

In Bud Light’s 2015 Super Bowl commercial a lucky guy in a bar gets the once in a lifetime opportunity to be Pac Man. He dons a yellow vest and is chased by four colourful ghosts through a life-sized maze for a fun retro game of Pac Man.

The commercial brought the popular 1980 old school game back with the help of a new technology called BlackTrax and Sheridan graduates Marty Cochrane and William McDaniel.

On Super Bowl night 114.4 million people in the US viewed the ad, which is a Super Bowl record, and since then it’s had 19.5 million views on YouTube.

“BlackTrax was the tracking product used in the commercial to trigger the lights in the floor as Pac Man ran over them in real time,” said McDaniel, a BlackTrax product specialist.

The Technical Production Theatre and Live Events program grads were chosen to go to Los Angeles for a week in early January to set up the BlackTrax system and make sure it was ready to use for filming the ad.

They were responsible for recreating the idea of Pac Man eating the pellets by using the technology created by Cast software to trigger 251 different dots inside the maze, which would turn off when the player ran over it.

“It was actually very cool being able to go down and actually work on the show,” said Cochrane, a BlackTrax product manager. “It was definitely a very unique experience.”

Cochrane says BlackTrax is a vision-based tracking system used in the live entertainment industry. The BlackTrax technology has currently been used in Cirque de Soleil, Disney on Ice Frozen and Marvel Universal live tour.

In order for the system to locate the 251 trigger points around the lights and the sensor pack in the yellow vest worn by Pac Man, they hung eight infrared cameras in the air around the maze.

“You can see it on the shoulders, those dots were seen by the cameras and were able to triangulate in real time where Pac Man was when he was running through the maze,” said McDaniel. “As he ran over a light it would know and be able to tell the lighting system to turn off that light as if Pac Man ate the dot.”

McDaniel tested BlackTrax himself to make sure the system was calibrated and the lights were turning up when they were supposed to.

“There was a lot of testing, which was basically me running through the maze being Pac Man in this giant life-sized game,” said McDaniel. “I grew up playing Pac Man like a lot of other people and I have to say it’s one of the coolest things that I’ve been a part of so far.”

“They did a good job of displaying what happened and what was going on,” said Cochrane. “The quality of the ad was very high professional as you would expect from a super bowl ad, but we were quite impressed with the end result for sure.”

Bud Light also released a popular behind-the-scenes video, which featured Cochrane operating the BlackTrax system in a new and interesting way that hasn’t been used before.

“It was a really cool because most of the people in our industry are behind the scenes,” said Cochrane. “People got to see how it all worked and how all the various components all connected together to create Pac Man.”

“It was an ability for us to show off the way that the technology could work in a non traditional format from what we are used to,” said Cochrane.