Creating a CG Environment for Sky Vegas
Ever wondered what goes into making a fully CG room?
Our Senior Nuke Artist and VFX supervisor, Jason shares his experience in creating a full CG environment and how his love for the craft helped to visualise the fantasy of a larger than life space.
What was the business challenge?
‘FOTW Anywhere’ came in full swing for this. We sent our Lead Creative to the Sky Betting and Gaming offices, who worked and brainstormed with the internal team to create a successful vehicle for the 2019 / 2020 Sky Vegas campaigns across TV, digital and print. We helped to develop the Vegas HQ concept to get it through numerous testing – ready to then take over the production process. The brief was to make sure we integrated the live action and CG aspects that come from Sky Vegas rather than shoehorning them together – which by housing the King in Vegas HQ worked perfectly!
What expertise did FOTW bring to the table?
FOTW were closely involved from the start, teaming up with SB&G to nail the creative for a coherent theme running through three campaigns. FOTW was then enlisted to produce the five day three campaign shoot, which was the largest one the client has undertaken. The project involved large scale set builds, VFX supervision, full green screen studio, moving cameras and a large cast of talent.
What was the most fun and the biggest challenge?
The really fun stuff involved match moving all of the extras, building multiple takes of multiple extras into one smooth camera move. We needed to create a carefully layered, believable scene that looked real, and part of this involved adding in volumetric lighting effects. We also shot everything with an old 1960’s anamorphic lens – adding in the same lens characteristics onto our 3D and composite to really get it to sit perfectly within the scene.
The most challenging part of the project was definitely how to best manage the anamorphic footage. The director had decided he wanted to film with an anamorphic lens to give the advert a much wider letterbox look. The amount of warp it adds into the shot is truly astonishing – this obviously complicated the tracking and camera matching we had to do too.
And the workflow?
We used Nuke for all the compositing and Cinema4d for all the 3D elements. We had to match move all the live action shots to ensure we had a perfect digital representation of the camera move and then place that into our 3D environment. Nuke’s 3D system was also utilised to build the set extension for a number of the live action shots.
Like what you see?
If you fancy a chat about what we do, give us a call on 01582 881144 or drop us an email hello@falloffthewall.com. We’d love to hear from you!