VERB Hydrate Commercial | VP

I recently had the opportunity to work as the VAD and Volume Op for a cosmetics commercial. Big shoutout to the team over at the Be Electric studio up on NYC, working with them is always a pleasure, they're so dialed in to their technology that shoots are always incredibly smooth and efficient.

As the VAD I was tasked with creating an exterior concert/music festival environment featuring three distinct times of day, and a virtual crowd to help fill out the space behind the extras on set.

The whole project was built in just a couple of weeks over the holidays, so my priority was to rapidly develop a general environment, and then focus down on crowd building and optimisation, as the team's goal was to shoot 48FPS slow mo in-camera on the Volume.

The overall environment went through a couple quick phases of development starting with more of a Coachella / Indio Valley vibe, before shifting towards more of a Summerstage / Central Park vibe.

To facilitate the density of a crowd at scale for realtime playback, and knowing that the director would be shooting at T1.4 with shallow focus, the decision was made to use medium-quality skeletal mesh models for the first ~2-3 rows of the virtual crowd, to get more of a full 3D integrated lighting look closest to talent, with the rest of the crowd being made up of 2D sprites animating from flipbooks I baked using the custom crowd models. I utilised PCG for crowd and forest generation in this scene, and for the crowds I created a parent class of blueprints which the 3D and 2D characters derived from, which would randomise their clothing, colours, and selected animations on Construction. This allowed for rapid prototyping of the whole scene, and quick previs review with the client team.

I also built a tool for the shoot to help integrate virtual and practical lighting on-set. For their "Dusk" time, they wanted to simulate the lights from the concert stage spilling over the crowd, so I designed a blueprint controller that I could animate colour shifts in Sequencer, which would then grab all the tagged virtual spotlights and Ndisplay light cards to sync the lighting shifts for the virtual crowd and the LED ceiling panel for the talent on-set. On the day, I also quickly added DMX output which sent data to several RGB practical lights that they put up around talent to further integrate the overall lighting. These tools helped bring the whole look together practically and digitally, and allowed me to make on-the-fly adjustments to colours and timing with the client team during their shoot.

I'm immensely proud of the final result, the footage captured was absolutely gorgeous. I'm also happy I was able to guide a director through their first experience shooting on a Volume, the client team onsite was thrilled, and we got them the looks they wanted on such a quick turn-around.