Lights On.

A TV commercial with a building being lit up with office lights.

I was working for an FX company in Sydney back in the early 80’s. A job came in that required an office building to have its lights flicker on in a sequence.

We built a light box with many fluro tubes and animated it by replacing cards with random gaps in them. Take an image, replace the card with a different set of gaps, take another image, and so on.

The gaps became more frequent as we went on until all the lights were on. For the shot, we had a building either side. These were wood and acrylic builds. The wood one was older looking and had more details added.