Making of “A Hypnotic Journey” with Alessandra Kila

“Through the mechanical and perpetual movements of diamonds, malachite, tourmaline and pearls the viewer is taken from a rational state of mind to a trance-like hallucination where both image and colours react to the altered state of mind. Jewels are real, but they are also a sub-conscious reality that exist as a state of desire in our mind.”

– Alessandra Kila

 

Follow Alessandra Kila into a world of hypnotic machines that enthrall through their perpetual movement. Working closely with our London studio, a triptych of full CGI videos evolved, each featuring a piece of Chanel jewellery functioning like an entrancing device: a necklace oscillates like a pendulum, a ring repeats the pattern of a spinning machine and a bracelet echoes the circular movements of a gyroscope.

How we made it:

Starting with a moodboard of references drawn from architecture, fashion, textures and art,  Alessandra Kila created a world with a highly  curated and very distinct slant on Art Deco.

The jewellery was recreated in CGI from the  original pieces, with great attention paid to the texturing of surfaces and the properties of the precious stones. Detail is everything…

For the animations Alessandra and our 3D artist Anna Toropova tested and observed the movements in real life before imitating them on screen. For instance, repeatedly dropping and filming a pearl or a ring, then replicating its motion in CGI.

At times that meant working frame by frame to achieve the most realistic flow. Clay renders below show the careful, precise progress of  the work.

The simplified set design and colours subtly harmonise with the Art Deco style of the jewellery pieces.

The sets are particularly inspired by ideas around vitrines and the display of precious objects.

Glitchy psychedelic interruptions jolt the viewer from their reverie, creating dramatic dissonances.

Initial tests show wild experimentation for colours that have just the right qualities.

The final colour grading and sound design pull all the pieces together – blending these two aesthetic worlds.

 

View all three pieces together on our website.

 

Director: Alessandra Kila
Concept, Look Development: Alessandra Kila
Full CGI Motion and Stills: Recom Farmhouse
Editor: Zoe Alexandrou
Music Composer and Sound Designer: Manuel Pinheiro
VFX: Alessandra Kila
Compositing: Felix Baesch / Recom Farmhouse
Modelling: Tanguy Koutouan / Recom Farmhouse
Texturing and Shading: Joe Carney / Recom Farmhouse
Animatics and Lighting: Anna Toropova / Recom Farmhouse
Color Grading: Christoph Bolten / Recom Farmhouse
Still Retouching: Aljaz Bezjak, Maria Luisa Calosso / Recom Farmhouse

Making Of “Haze”

Project: Haze Creative Director: Kate Brown CGI Artist: Marvin Lübke Post Production: Kate Brown Aljaz Bezjak

Tomek Makolski collaborates with Recom Farmhouse to create full CGI staging for an evocative slice of 80s Vegas life.Bored but ultra-glamorous, she stalks her enclosed world of a motel in purest yellow. The images are drenched in intense pastel yellows and blues, but below the surface gloss of this sunny palette, there’s tension in these moments out of time, a sense of detachment, drift and dream.

Why this solitary intermission in her life, just killing time?

Subtle cues in the setting hint at an ambivalent celebrity and faint, atmospheric menace.

A Look Behind The Scenes

We were delighted to collaborate with Tomek to bring this idea to life.

The model photography was already complete, so we began with her character, working collaboratively to imagine a setting for her that would be right for her aesthetic…stylish but faintly gritty.

With a huge variety of movements to choose from, we chose those that contributed to the atmosphere we are trying to build – strongly defined poses with interesting shapes – and built an environment for this character to inhabit.

A sense of place is central to creating realistic environments, even though we didn’t want to without being too explicit about the location. We settled on suburban Las Vegas as having the right combination of motel style that we needed to stage the scenes.

Searching to find a sweet spot between surrealism and reality, we created a realistic motel, and turned every part of yellow to add a jolt of unreality, as well as giving a stylishly minimal feel to the detailed environments.

Smaller cues such as her face in the poster on the wall, or in the magazines ,add to an almost subliminal sense of displacement.

It’s also a time capsule of 80s elements. The styling of the model had already been carefully considered – her sun visor, big hair channeling Faye Dunaway, the cut of her swimsuit – so we chose props such as the vending machine to enhance the feeling of a shift in time.

Tomek already had a moodboard of references, and we expanded on this with contemporary details for all elements – whether integral parts of the set like breeze blocks or railing designs, to objects like towers of cards and an oversized phone.Items like a baseball bat or broken glass contributed to the faint sense of unease, and the feeling of depth and difference in focus enhances the dream-like feeling of the series.

Technical Process

We wanted to use a different, more stripped back workflow on this project. The images were begun in Unreal, the CGI finished in Blender, and then composited and graded in Capture One.

Everything is CGI in the images except the model and the sun lounger – and in fact we we recreated the sun lounger in CGI for a seamless match between the real and the virtual.

We began the project in Unreal, so we could adjust all the elements of the set with maximum interactivity. In Unreal, we matched the lighting and angles of the CGI environment to the original model shots, and tested colours and props at lightning speed.

Instant feedback at high fidelity allowed us to be adventurous in art direction…moving the model around the set without the need to wait for renders. It’s a great platform for experimentation and taking chances.

 

With the creative decisions made, we moved the project into Blender for the last stage.

This meant we could render the final CGI environments in a high enough quality that we could go directly to compositing and colour grading – an interesting exercise for us to see how far we could push pure CGI.

Finally, we added the model in via Capture One with minimal colour work – just minimal grading to balance her correctly into the CGI backplate.

 

We hope you enjoy the way this collaboration blurs the line between fantasy and reality…we’re proud to have made the dream real.

Soundtrack:  We recommend Bananarama and Fun Boy Three: Our Lips Are Sealed

See the entire project on www.recomfarmhouse.com or Behance

Photographer: Tomek Makolski

Concept: Tomek Makolski & Michal Sek

Model: Ola Kowal / modelplus

Photographer’s Assistant: Adam Gocel

Make-up Artist: Adrian Swiderski

Hair artist: Patryk Nadolny
Stylist: Milena Bekalarska

Studio, equipment and support: Studio Tęcza
Creative Director: Kate Brown / Recom Farmhouse
CGI Artist: Marvin Lübke / Recom Farmhouse
Post Artists: Kate Brown, Aljaz Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse

Making of: Perfect Storm with Thomas Brown

Thomas Brown : Perfect Storm

Sci-fi influences are worn proudly on the sleeve of this series for Wallpaper magazine. Thomas Brown was commissioned again for their “Perfect Storm” editorial, in which “elemental forces and industrial strength converge in a whirlwind of high-voltage design”.

Thomas worked with his long term collaborator, the set designer Matt Morris. Together with Cloud and Horse set builders and projectionist Insight Lighting, they created “a dramatic sci-fi world where a weird automated transit system is augmented with external and often extreme natural phenomena.”

Behind the scenes at the warehouse location: Raising and lowering platforms provide unusual viewpoints…and the scissor lifts themselves are incorporated in the set design, whilst projections create different ambiances for each shot

 

 

 

More images behind the scenes, including the construction of the mirrored boxes, from set builders Cloud & Horse here. (Behind the scenes pictures by Alex Davenport)

Clous & Horse behind the scenes

The final images were published in Wallpaper magazine:

 

And you can see the whole series here:
Perfect Storm with Thomas Brown on recomfarmhouse.com

Perfect Storm with Thomas Brown on Behance

Thomas Brown : Perfect Storm

 

Client: Wallpaper
Photographer: Thomas Brown
Photographer’s Agent: Webber Represents
Set Designer: Matt Morris
Set Build: Cloud and Horse
Projectionist: Insight Lighting
Post Artists: Aljaz Bezjak / Maria Luisa Calosso / Recom Farmhouse

On Location: Nissan Juke

We travelled to Spain with Nick Meek to shoot the new Nissan Juke in a series of elegant architectural settings. For post-production, this involved a wide spectrum of skills – from shooting duplicate cars in order to avoid complex reflections, bringing sunshine to a rainy day, and finally a dramatic day-to-night conversion.

For this shot, the reflections of the structure were too much to be removed in post, so Nick photographed duplicate cars inside and outside the building, Christoph captured additional backplate elements. We had to deal with very mixed weather conditions! The team went out on a boat to shoot the skyline – the cityscape that you see in the shot was puzzled together from many separate shots to get the perfect backplate, evocative of an attractive city without detracting the viewer from the car as the hero of the shot. Join us on location:

Nights are drawing in! After the shoot was completed, Nissan wanted a night-time version of one of the shots. This was a very interesting challenge – moving a very high key image to be ultra low key

The car is a new, special edition model, so the alterations were complex – far beyond just changing the colour. We re-rendered the paint and the interior of the car – only tyres and lights remain from the original model. Using the HDR spheres that we’d produced at the time, we re-rendered the building and environment. The floor was taken from the original (pre-retouching) imagery, so retained its texture and was accurate at night. We replaced the city at skyline at the back with sourced material to make a new nightscape.

The new shot retains the elegant simplicity of composition that is a key part of the original, whilst adding the distinct ambience of a moonlit night.

Nissan

See the process here:

And the whole campaign on Behance here.

Client: Nissan Europe

Agency: TBWA/Paris

Art Director: Elisabeth Ribeiro

Assistant Art Director: Maude Muller

Art Buyer: Marie Moulin

Photographer: Nick Meek

Production: New Moon Productions

CGI Artist: Kristian Turner (daytime shot), Carlos Pecino (night time shot)

Post Artists: Pepê Alram, Ulf Cantignon, Christoph Bolten

Making of Frame Magazine Covers with Thomas Brown and Andrew Stellitano

Frame Magazine assigned photographer Thomas Brown and set designer Andrew Stellitano to create visual interpretations of four themes for their four latest issues – they always work in series for their covers, which they treat as an art project in themselves.

This way of working was an ideal fit for Thomas and Andrew, who enjoy the process of creating a thematically coherent series with colour and abstraction as the central concepts. The only stipulation that Frame made was that the images should be colourful, and there should be an environmental, spatial feel to the images, with architectural depth.

Having worked often together before, they took the initial proposal as a framework but built on it as the work progressed.

One of the most enjoyable parts of this project was the discovery of new ideas to try, as they arose from the initial concepts. It wasn’t all chin-stroking….there was a lot of laughter along the way, as these behind the scenes photos show – enjoy!

Nº 1 of 4: Doubt.

This was inspired by the idea of image as deceptions – thinking about the current geopolitical situation, fake news, the difficulty of knowing what is actually real.

“For the cover of this issue, we created a spatial experience that is all in the mind. The world seems to have flipped on its head, and nothing is as it seems. A tunnel that extends off into the distance is, on close examination, made out of a modular toolkit of materials”  — Thomas Brown and  Andrew Stellitano 

 

‘Using wood, paper, watercolour, acrylic, glass, organic materials and glycerine, …[they] built a multilayered world that hovers between fantasy and reality. Aptly titled Doubt, it’s their first cover in a series of four’

—  Frame Magazine

Nº 2 of 4: Ephemeral.

Exploring the idea of temporality and events such as fashion shows that are hugely involved but fleeting. Flashes in eight different colours captured blocks falling around the static forms.

“Inspired by the speed at which the world is changing, we wanted to create a sculpture that is more than the sum of its parts and that can be captured only as a photograph. With our camera, we compress time.” — Thomas Brown and  Andrew Stellitano 

 

“Using stroboscopic lighting in combination with long time exposures the photographer captured moving elements around a static object, creating a feeling of impermanence.” —  Frame Magazine

Nº 3 of 4: Environment.

Here, the duo considered the environment in conjunction with illusion and image-making. It’s full of opposites – bringing the outside inside, gravity defying rocks, objectifying the natural and slicing the outside into contained bars in the background.

“We were inspired by a Diane Arbus photograph taken behind the scenes at Disneyland. The image shows huge boulders on wheels against the vast Californian landscape – an artificial backdrop at second sight. It’s a spellbinding scene that puts our expectation of reality into flux. ” — Thomas Brown and  Andrew Stellitano 

 

“An outdoor environment that doesn’t play by the normal rules of physics. Rocks become easily transportable objects, and panels function as portals to an alternate reality” —  Frame Magazine

Nº 4 of 4: Food.

For the final image, they chose the theme of food. Though it’s ubiquitous, it’s not often an environmental element. The can is revolutionary – its invention changed our relationship to food completely. Its reminiscent of a bitmap, modular, reactive with its simple silver surface which both renders it invisible and responds to the environment around it with reflection and distortion. The shallow water below joins the elements by rising to the right height to make the cans appear to unite, and the projection of Kyoto adds yet another layer of texture and colour.

Shallow water was just below to join elements

“Photography can be a wasteful business, but the contents of all the cans on this issue’s cover were either donated to food banks or turned into amazing corn bread, corn curry and corn fritters. We never want to eat corn again”

— Thomas Brown and  Andrew Stellitano 

 

“To round off their series of four covers, designed to explore materiality and space [they] … chose food packaging as their medium. Stacked to form primary shapes, the tins create an intriguing landscape.” —  Frame Magazine

Client: Frame Magazine
Photographer: Thomas Brown
Art Direction: Studio&
Set Designer: Stellitano Studio
Post Artist: Aljaz Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse London
Photographer Agent: Webber Represents

 You can also see the final images on our website and on Behance. 

Recom Farmhouse is on Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo and Twitter!
More work at recomfarmhouse.com.

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Making “Of Rainbows And Other Monuments” with Clemens Ascher

Photographer: Clemens Ascher CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toropova Post Artists: Pepe Alram, Aljaz Bezjak Stylist: Alice Whiting Make-up: Amy Conley Hair: Brooke Neilson

Clemens Ascher dreamt up “this surrealistic and graphic world featuring mysterious monuments, the legendary Ferrari Rainbow and its furious drivers” – a minimalistic and metaphysical series in three subtly muted primary colours.

The ultra-distinctive stylings of Bertone cars are epitomised by the angular Ferrari Rainbow. This astonishing wedge-shaped concept car from 1976 never went into production and the prototype remains concealed in Bertone’s private collection.

Photos by Rainer Schlegelmilch and story on this largely forgotten legend here:
https://www.classicdriver.com/en/article/cars/classic-concepts-1976-ferrari-rainbow

Through CGI we set out to bring it into a uniquely imagined world. Clemens began by sketching  a deceptively simple series of shapes, exploring balance, colour and volume.

In the Recom Farmhouse London studio, we took Clemens’ initial sketches and began to work with them in CGI, turning the blocked volumes into architectural elements and experimenting with the placement of the car.

Gathering references for the concrete and asphalt. We spent time observing how the materials age, plants, water, sand and other natural forces work on the angular forms of buildings.

.Collaboratively, we created the monuments, making the abstract shapes work intriguingly but believably together. And we incorporated some pre-shot elements from Clemens – for instance, skies and figures.

Working closely at every stage with the photographer, we created the perfect setting and mood for this mysterious supercar. See how the yellow image was built up in this video:

View the rest of the series here

Photographer: Clemens Ascher
Stylist: Alice Whiting
Model: Jacopo Ugolini
Make-up Artist: Amy Conley
Hair Stylist: Brooke Neilson and Craig McAtear

CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toporova / Recom Farmhouse
Retouching: Aljaz Bezyak, Pêpe Alram / Recom Farmhouse

On Location: Mercedes E-Class with Nadav Kander

Mercedes with Nadav Kander

The Mercedes E-Class with Nadav Kander for Antoni  – a fascinating project creating an extraordinary car campaign. Strong lines, clear colours and striking textures combine with abstract architecture, surreal volcanic landscapes and of course the sleek refined lines of the flagship convertible.

The concepts contained angular modern architectural elements, contrasting beautifully with rough organic texture of the volcanic rock. Initially the idea was to have a modular set built that could be moved around the platform. However, this had a number of logistical and timing difficulties and so our Berlin team offered to create the elements in CGI instead. We were able to work directly with the art director in the studio to experiment with the utmost flexibility. In this way, we could perfect the shape and angles to match the layouts perfectly before the shoot began, whilst adhering to Nadav Kander’s input of keeping everything as simple as possible.

Testing the layouts and trialling different options:

Scene overview in CGI

With the angles confirmed, the shoot began.

Fresh from his fascinating portrait of Donald Trump for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year cover, the Nadav Kander flew to Lanzarote to shoot backplates and HDR spheres.

Scouting for the perfect locations for HDR spheres in the volcanic island landscapes:

shooting an example HDR Sphere from Lanzarote

After Lanzarote, we took more backplates at this spectacular location on the Spanish coast. This was the view from the infinity pool – if you squint, you can just see Africa.

The crew assemble…

Only the topmost graduates of The Handsome Boy Modelling School can throw a towel off and jump in the pool with such verve and élan…

Perfect dive!

perfect dive

Our own modelling efforts are less professional.

Still, everyone looks better with a giant yellow head. You can just see the base of the cherrypicker beside the pool, to take the shot from a direct birds-eye view.

High up above in the cherrypicker

Up in the sky for the perfect angle

The Recom poolside cabana is fully equipped! Processing and checking everything will fit together perfectly.

As the car was top secret at the time,  it couldn’t be photographed on location, and was shot at a secret platform on a closed set with high security.  We lived for a few days in a gilded cage, not leaving the hotel with its three shooting platforms.

This was our work view for the week! We have to confess we much preferred the pool….

Super Secret Location

Once the car and backplates were safely captured, we began work on putting together the images. We set the car seamlessly in the volcanic landscapes, and refined the textures and shapes of the CGI architecture.

The results form a uniquely stylish car campaign – Check out the rest of this elegant series on our site

Credits:

Client: Mercedes
Agency: Antoni
Photographer: Nadav Kander
Creative Director: Tillmann Gossner
Art Director: Patricia Scheder
Art Buyer: Valerie Opitz
Production: Seaquist
Representation: Olivia Gideon Thompson at We Folk
CGI Artists: Sebastian Schierwater / Recom Berlin
Post Artists: Jonathan Clarke, Jonas Disch, Stephanie O’Connor, Jonas Braukmann / Recom Berlin

Making of: Lamborghini Aventador with Marc Trautmann

Marc Trautmann came to us with an idea for a creative collaboration between CGI, photography, and architecture. The astonishing sculpted form of the Lamborghini Aventador would be set in deconstructed architectural elements, inspired by Daniel Libeskind, with both the car and the setting realised entirely in CGI.

“The concept of the personal CGI work was to create power and dynamics by dissolving conventional spatial structures.”

We loved the idea of creating an environment that would mesh perfectly with the extravagantly powerful style of the car, the challenge of making such an impossible setting look believable, and of course the collaboration between three creative disciplines.

1.Sketching out ideas

The first stage is to sketch out the initial concepts – no matter how technological the execution, there’s still nothing like breaking out the sharpies and sketchpads for free experimentation and collaboration in the early stages.

Initial sketches

2. Moodboard: structure, architecture, light.

When we are planning a deconstructed architectural enviroment, it’s vital to find reference for the elements so that they are completely convincing. We looked for abstract shattered planes and shards to inspire ideas, but also for reference of how light would move and react between the shapes. And we sought out architecture – both imagined and built – that was close to our vision, to see how it is structured in reality.

Moodboard_architecture and structure

3. Architectural session 

Marc worked with Franken Architekten to construct and then deconstruct a setting around the car. Originally created in architectural CAD, they were exported as .dwg files for us to work with in Maya.

1511_150407_MTR Aventador_Top
1511_150407_MTR Aventador
1511_150407_MTR Aventador_Perspective_01

4. Initial tests with the car

Once the initial concept is drafted, we began to refine the ideas in Maya. We experimented with different directions and angles and light sources within the architectural setting.

Aventador16_f78_30mm_03AT_AO-Occlusion
Aventador_03_KTT_f78

 

Aventador_03_KTT_f34

Once we were happy with the angles and the placement of the car, we crafted preliminary passes on lighting and mood.

_0005_Aventador_01_KTT_masterLayer_c4.exr
Aventador_09_KTT_masterLayer

5. Materials.

The next stage is to look in detail at the textures of concrete, steel and glass – once again, we make moodboards of real-world examples.

Moodboard 2 - Materials

For the detailed observations to make the renders perfectly convincing, we used material references from Marc Trautmann – the concrete floor of his studio had the perfect worn industrial texture we were after.

FullSizeRender

With the textures in place, we worked with Marc in developing the background further. Together, we sketched out where texture and lighting should be refined and perfected.

Untitled-2
Aventador_10_KTT_amendments

6. Last adjustments
We tested colour and mood  variants, fine-tuning the lighting and perfecting the dynamism and balance between the structures of the car and of the deconstructed setting. High resolution rendering in Vray shows how the details are coming together here.

Aventador16_12_KTT

 

7. The final artwork – three images of an extraordinary car in an extraordinary space.

Concept & Creative Director: Marc Trautmann Architecture: Franken Architelten CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toropova / Recom Farmhouse Post Artists: Kate Brown, Riikka Eiro / Recom Farmhouse

Fly through the modelling and see how we built up the image, in our behind the scenes movie here!

See the full series on our site here

Concept & Creative Director: Marc Trautmann at Schierke
Architecture: Franken Architekten
CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Anna Toropova / Recom Farmhouse
Post Artists: Kate Brown, Riikka Eiro / Recom Farmhouse

Stuff we like: Bright geometry in modern architecture

It’s always amazing when someone shows us a new idea in architectural photography.

Norwegian photographer Øystein Sture Aspelund‘s vision of modernist architecture focuses in on details and textures of modern masterpieces, found by searching through Brasilia, Sao Paulo, rural Bulgaria, Valencia, Bratislava and the Italian coast. Infusing them with strong yet delicate tints of sunsets, cyan and rose, the sweeping and beautiful lines are reminiscent of a new colony on another world.

Your imagination can fill in the rest from these precisely observed details….

Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund
Cyan II by Øystein Sture Aspelund

All photos © Øystein Sture Aspelund
More work  at http://oysteinaspelund.com
The full series is also available for your appreciation on Behance.

Making of : IN THE GARDEN by Clemens Ascher

RecomFarmhouse_Ascher-3

Clemens Ascher’s latest series “IN THE GARDEN” depicts scenes from an indoor garden complex.
The world he represents appears to be entirely artificial, a plastic utopia carefully designed to deliver happiness and comfort to its inhabitants. The bright and saturated colours in these pictures are seemingly trying to compensate for the void in which these people live.

We have helped our friend Clemens in constructing this dystopian vision by adding some CG elements to his pictures. Together we discussed the set prior to his shoot and we came to the conclusion that models, plastic plants, carpets and placeholders for walls were going to be photographed, whilst windows, final walls and all other architectural elements would be created in CG.

Photographer: Clemens Ascher Fashion Stylist: Alice Whiting

Hair Stylist: Craig McAtear CGI Director: Kristian Turner / Recom Farmhouse 
CGI Artist: Florian Einfalt / Recom Farmhouse Post Artist: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown, Andrea Tosello / Recom Farmhouse

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