Making of : Duckstein Beer by Markus Mueller

For the new Duckstein campaign, photographer Markus Mueller was asked to visualise two men drinking on top of a pint of beer with the foam spilling out and blending into a cloudscape. For this surreal scene Markus contacted CGI director Thorsten Jasper Weese at Recom because he needed to create most of the image in CG. Markus provided us with lots of backplates of real clouds shot during the numerous flights he had taken to photograph the other images for the campaign. We ended up using his shots for the clouds in the distance, and the ground visible through the gaps of the CG clouds. We then developed together with Markus the visuals for the foreground clouds in CGI.

The boxes above are called ‘Bounding Boxes’. They effectively define the boundaries of each of the clouds’s volumes that we have created in CGI.

The wire frame above explains better the geometry that our CG artist Richard Jenkinson has used for the making of the clouds.

He also created different passes to help our creative retoucher Jonas Braukmann in making the content of the pint look real.

The render of the white cloud pass is the light and shadow created by the sun. The red one has been used to mimic the sunset warm light. The last render is a ‘World Normals’ pass. The colours indicate the direction of each of the tiny parts of the fluid, which all together, make the cloud. This allowed our retoucher to fine-tune the light and shadow.

And this is how Jonas did it.

CREDITS:

Client: Duckstein

Photographer: Markus Mueller

CGI-Director: Thorsten Jasper Weese / Recom

Post-Artist: Jonas Braukmann / Recom CGI-Artist: Richard Jenkinson / Recom