Ukranian duo Tania Shcheglova & Roman Noven work under the name Synchrodogs.
Using strictly film cameras “with different levels of crappyness” they create dreamlike and hauntingly beautiful visions with almost no retouching. Central to the work is their own nude bodies in expansive landscapes, with a constant stream of details, abstracts, patterns (and just whatever catches their eye) as accompanying wildcards.
Although they’re determinedly lo-fi artists, working with props, body paint and whatever chance provides, they’re already looking at a future direction in VR art. It will be fascinating to see what their agnostic creative force might bring to a new medium.
The Dallas Contemporary Art Gallery recently exhibited their latest project, Supernatural, inspired by “their own meditation technique”. With help from print sales and uncompromising fashion and editorial work, they took a 4000 mile road trip in the American Southwest – from Big Bend to White Sands, from Vermilion Cliffs to Antelope Canyon.
As they say themselves: “Describing pictures makes it less interesting for the viewer to see them” so here’s a selection.
The latest Kronenbourg 1664 campaign for French advertising agency Herezie has been a great creative challenge. Working closely with the agency from pitch, through studio and location photography to CGI and post production, we were briefed to extend the iconic 1664 ribbon beyond the confines of the bottles label. The creatives at Herezie wanted us to push the boundaries of possibility, playing with perspective and scale in order to create a perfect red cross. Hence, we crafted pink flamingos flying over real beaches, a string of buoys floating on the Mediterranean Sea, a luxurious rooftop bar overlooking the Seine River with laser beams lighting up the city’s night sky which, together with the beer, continue the red ribbons of the 1664 logo.
This is our first project for New York based French photographer Jean-Yves Lemoigne and we’re pretty stoked about it because we’ve been wanting to work with him for a while – check out his work!
For this advertising campaign featuring the new ITV show “The Durrells” he first traveled to Corfu to capture the landscape and then to London to shoot the actors and animals in the studio. Our part was to combine all the different elements to make them look like they were shot all together. Jean-Yves and creative director Anton Ezer came to our London studio to brief post artist Kate Brown on the mood and the different selects for the actors and animals.
Have a look at the making-of below to see how Kate has worked her magic to bring together these wonderful images. A task made a lot easier by Jean-Yves who shot the separate elements very skilfully, making sure that lighting and perspectives matched perfectly.
And this is the mouse shot for the ad…so cute, we couldn’t resist from showing how posey he was!
Below are the family portraits . . . with photobombing animals!
CREDITS
Client: ITV
Creative Director: Anton Ezer
Photographer: Jean-Yves Lemoigne
Production: Making Pictures
Post Artist: Kate Brown / Recom Farmhouse
Today (29th January 2016) will see the last Landrover Defender roll off the production line in the West Midlands. Almost 70 years since its inception this Iconic utilitarian creation will cease to be built.
As a celebration, here is one of our favourite series’ featuring the legendary vehicle. Photography partners Heckl & Menneman (he&me) masterfully capture its best side, that would be the snowy off-road one.
This is the biggest international campaign Hamburg agency Kolle Rebbe has ever produced and it was also our most complex CGI production ever!
For Audi we created a full CGI winter landscape spiralling within itself: road, trees, rocks, snow, clouds and sky all curl around into a perspective that would have been impossible to photograph.
In these scenes the cars, also created in CGI, are speeding on a snowy road next to ski runs with real competing athletes.
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign (detail)
With a total of 52 motives distributed in 180 ski areas in Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France, the teams in Berlin, Stuttgart and London joined forces to produce these mind twisting visuals under extreme time pressure. The heavy geometry of the landscapes required us to create a new pipeline to handle the different assets and be able to sculpt, texture and light the scenes in real time.
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign
Our CGI artists started with a simplified geometry of the spiral. Once the basic shape was achieved, this could then be sculpted in detail. In the meantime other artists were generating and rendering trees and moss.
Simplified geometry to create the spiral landscape
A small team went to Poland another one went to Chamonix in France where thanks to our friends Nick and Martha, we found the perfect locations to photograph and scan cliffs and rocks with a drone.
First 3D result of scanned rock
First 3D result of scanned rock
Terrain Geometry
CGI Trees
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign (detail)
Audi Quattro Winter Campaign (detail)
It has been a lot of intense work to produce all the visuals for this campaign, but nonetheless an amazing collaboration with the creatives at Kolle Rebbe! . . . and the campaign is everywhere!
CREDITS:
Client: Audi
Agency: Kolle Rebbe
Creative Director: Jörg Dittmann
Art Director: Benjamin Allwardt and Marcus Kubicke
Project Manager: Amelie Pamp
Art Buyer: Katja Sluyter
Post Production Project Manager : Lars Wittmaak / Recom Stuttgart
CGI Directors: Christoph Bolten / Recom Farmhouse London and Jonas Braukmann / Recom Berlin
CGI Lead Artist: Kristian Turner / Recom Farmhouse London
CGI Artists: Richard Jenkinson / Recom Berlin; Florian Einfalt and Dariusz Makowski / Recom Farmhouse London; Ivo Stanev / Recom Stuttgart
Post Artists: Pepê Alram and Kate Brown / Recom Farmhouse London; Christian Schemer and Nele Ebner / Recom Stuttgart; Jonas Braukmann / Recom Berlin
Kai Tietz approached us with yet another awesome Mercedes-Benz Sprinter advertising campaign – and we were happy to be part of the usual Team. We worked together with photographer Martijn Oort to create a series of visuals for the new Sprinter Edition campaign. Martijn was responsible for the photography part and CG supervision. He photographed the backplate and all the people. We created the vehicles and other key elements of the images in CGI. Kai Tietz managed the whole project in the background.
In the scene above, the balloon and the lower part of the building on the left hand side have been created in CGI. Due to location limitations on Berlin Gendarmenmarkt, we weren’t allowed to remove umbrellas in the background. That’s why we partly replaced the lower bit of the building with CG elements.
Martijn directed up to 50 people on a carpark in Berlin to populate the scene. All the people in the crowd have been masked and placed one by one in the image.
It was fun to create the balloon, although there were not lots of appropriate references to follow when it came to inflated elephants. We had to ask ourselves: “how does an elephant balloon fold once in tension?” and “how do the different parts of the balloon join together?” Below are screen grabs of the elephant modelled in Zbrush.
Here is the final CGI elephant balloon.
Below is a point cloud from our scans of the building we used to replace the umbrellas on Gendarmenmarkt.
For the image below, the whole quarry has been 3D scanned and recreated in Maya, though we only rendered the areas around the drillhead for the final image. The full quarry geometry helped us to position pipes, screws and detail elements on Martijn’s backplate photography anyway. The drill has been modelled in Zbrush and then we rendered everything (despite the vehicle, that was Vred) in Vray.
This is a snap taken whilst our CGI director and artists where on location scanning the quarry. And below a 3D cloud of the quarry’s wall stitched together.
Below are the sketches for the drill and the geometry created in ZBrush.
Martijn shot lots of awesome falling dust and gravel bits that we comped in photoshop. Have a look at the details of the final image by clicking on the image below and zooming in 100%.
CREDITS:
Client: Mercedes Benz
Agency: Lukas Lindemann Rosinski
Photographer: Martijn Oort
Projectmanagement: Kai Tietz Produktion Gmbh
Art Director: Dennis Mensching
Post-Artist: Jonas Braukmann / Recom Berlin
CGI-Artist: Richard Jenkinson / Recom Berlin
We are very pleased to announce that “In the Garden” by Clemens Ascher and “Exogenesis (or Life outside of Earth) by Alessandra Kila have respectively won gold and bronze at the GoSee Awards in the categories “Art” and “Stills“. We have helped Clemens build his dystopian visions by adding some CGI architectural elements to his images and we we have added some magic to Alessandra’s otherworldly images.
Here in the studio we like to share images that inspire us. This week we have come across the portfolio of photographer LINNNN. It’s so genuinely delicate, tender and beautiful with a very interesting colour palette of pinks, greens and blues. We find it very calming and even with such cold and acid colours on skin tones, she still manages to please. Hope you like it too!
Fashion photographer Ralph Mecke has shot this beautiful editorial for Best Fashion magazine.
Ralph’s images are shot on large format negative. You can just feel the film quality of these images; the grain, the tones, the depth of field is just incredible! We scanned the images in our studio in Stuttgart and fine tuned the colours.
CREDITS:
Photographer: Ralph Mecke
Production: Ylmaz Aktepe
Post Artist: Thomas Saalfrank/ Recom
Alessandra Kila is a photographer and close friend of ours. She pops in and out of the studio nearly every week and when she asked us to help her with her new series of images, we were as usual very happy to collaborate on her fantastical voyage to another planet as her work is just unlike anything else. And it’s stunning!
In this series called Exogenesis (or Life Outside of Earth) Alessandra ventures to unfamiliar territories looking for life forms beyond our planet. In her pictures the carefully constructed sets are overturned by the surprise of the unexpected. Alessandra is indeed an avid collector of oddities. All of the organic matter encountered in her still life comes from places she travels to – from the Atlas mountain of Morocco to the slate quarries of Snowdonia.
When she goes on a trip she always takes with her empty boxes and rucksacks that she then fills with stones, rusted metal wires, seeds, flowers and everything else she stumbles upon. She then re-assembles everything in her studio creating new juxtapositions which are both evocative and surreal.
We helped her in creating the lush colours of these fantastical worlds by refining the strong tonalities of her pictures and by blending together the many layers that form these not-so-still still life photographs.
Below you can find the making-of of one of the images together with some snaps from Alessandra’s studio.
CREDITS:
Concept and Photography: Alessandra Kila
Styling Assistant: Francesca Oletti
Retouching: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown / Recom Farmhouse
