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.
For this site-specific project we were asked by creative director Felipe Nunes Franco to visualise a Renault car breaking through the glass facade of Düsseldorf airport.
Excited by the idea of producing an artwork for a site specific project, a member of our Stuttgart team drove to Düsseldorf for a day to take reference pictures of the actual facade together with the exact measurements of the glass panels. In fact we had to accurately reproduce those dimensions in CG so that the billboard could exactly substitute and replicate the covered area with the car breaking through it.
In our studio in London, our CGI director Kristian Turner started to work on the geometry of the architecture and the car. In order to make the glass shattering into pieces, he found it easier to actually simulate a car crashing against a glass panel. Pepe, our senior retoucher overlaid the cracked glass and flying shards into the final composition.
… and here is the final campaign!
CREDITS:
Client: Renault
Agency: Publicis Pixel Park
Creative Director: Felipe Nunes Franco
CGI Director: Kristian Turner at Recom Farmhouse
CGI Artist: Kristian Turner at Recom Farmhouse
Post Artist: Pepe Alram at Recom Farmhouse
When we work on automotive images, we are usually asked to render cars into a photographic environment, but with the new Porsche Cayman GT4 it was exactly the opposite: Thomas Strogalski photographed a real car while the location was virtually created by our talented artists in Stuttgart.
Strogalski beautifully shot the car for plenty of different angles and our team, captained by CGI director Thorsten Jasper Weese then designed and modelled the architecture of an underground parking lot to accommodate the cars. We also matched the photographic car to a CGI model in order to render the reflections of the surrounding location onto the shiny yellow varnish. Throughout the project it has been a very close collaboration between Thomas, art director Tim Buchmüller, creative director Norman Henke and us.
Below few more images of the Cayman GT4.
CREDITS:
Client: Porsche
Agency: Kemper Kommmunikation GmbH
Art Director: Tim Buchmüller
Creative Director: Norman Henkel
Photography: Thomas Strogalski
CGI Director: Thorsten Jasper Weese
Post Artists: Nele Ebner, Thomas Fritz, Tobias Scheuerer at Recom
CGI Artist: Ina Bostelmann at Recom
Shot by photographer David Westphal, this production of images is another fine example of how realistic CG images can look! Our New York team traveled with David to the amazing forests, parks and beaches near Portland, Oregon. Our team provided both on-set retouching and pre-visualisation to allow everyone to see the car in situ and decide on the angles.
We are so pleased with the outcome of this series of images that we would like to show both the making of, as well as some details of the images zoomed in at 100%.
MAKING OF: FORD EXPLORER
UNRETOUCHED BACKPLATE vs FINAL IMAGE:
UNRETOUCHED BACKPLATE vs FINAL IMAGE:
UNRETOUCHED BACKPLATE vs FINAL IMAGE:
IMAGE ZOOMED IN AT 100% (click on the image to enlarge)
IMAGE ZOOMED IN AT 100%
IMAGE ZOOMED IN AT 100% (click on the image to enlarge)
CREDITS:
Agency: Team Detroit
Art Director: Andrew Smith
Photographer: David Westphal
CGI/POST: Recom Farmhouse NYC Team
We always try to squeeze in personal projects between one commission and the next. When doing them we love to collaborate, especially with photographers! So when Thorsten at Recom thought to build some stunning CG architecture with a CG car, he contacted photographer and mountain loverMichael Schnabel together with architect Fabian Evers. Excited by the idea, they began to look for a spectacular location in the mountains where it would be possible to virtually build the imaginary home of a car obsessed art collector. After viewing and scanning the mountainous landscape via satellite imagery, they travelled to the San Bernardino Pass in the Swiss Alps, located only a few hours away from our Stuttgart studio.
In the planning phase they first looked at a topographic model of a 20 square kilometer part of the pass to plan and start building up the architecture (see screenshot below). In the meantime architect Fabian started producing some elevation plans and drawings for the building.
Topography of the San Bernardino pass.
Elevation Plans made by architect Fabian Evers.
Positioning the architecture in relation to the topography of the pass.
Thorsten, Michael, Fabian and few other members of the crew went to the San Bernardino Pass and spent 3 days there for the shoot. CG artist Johann also took with them the CAD data of the house-model and they started to scout for the precise place where it should be built. They even sent up an octocopter to capture aerial back plates and then when the locations were decided, Thorsten shot HDR Spheres to recreate identical lighting for the 3D model of the architecture and cars.
Michael (on the left) with the crew location scouting.
Michael with previs of the car and architecture.
Sending up the octocopter for bird-eye views.
Thorsten Jasper Weese shooting HDR spheres.
Our well-travelled 3D calibration cube used to match the perspective of the 3D scene with the photographic back-plate.
Discussing shots on location.
Michael Schnabel and assistant during final shoot session.
A selection of viewpoints made by our CG artists before deciding the final camera angle and composition.
For the interior shots, all furniture and props were modelled by the CG Artists or brought in from the 3D database. Stylist Petra Langemeyer also helped our guys to choose some beautiful design objects. It all looks so real!
CREDITS:
Photographer: Michael Schnabel
CGI Director: Thorsten Jasper Weese
CGI Artist: Johann Oswald
Post Artists: Fabian Stehle, Jonas Braukmann. Jonas Disch, Thorsten Jasper Weese.
Virtual Architect: Fabian Evers
Octocoper-Support: Etienne Fuchs
Styling: Petra Langemeyer
Look at these images and look again because what first appears to be a theme park is in reality a carefully constructed world balancing on the threshold of leisure and order.
Shot by photographer Clemens Ascher, the series Pleasure Grounds depicts scenes where people are shown in a moment of leisure but the space they inhabit is bleak and slightly threatening. Military weapons and wild domesticated animals populate this landscape and as viewers we are unsure what is real and what is ficticious.
We have collaborated with Clemens in the realization of this fine art project, playing with altering the proportions of objects and people, choosing slightly off-putting poses for the models and using extremely bleak lighting to take the scene to the limits of reality. Clemens wanted to create an artificial world, nearly two-dimensional, where missiles, animals and people would function like interchangeable figurines, marionettes playing on a theatrical stage.
Whilst the background and animals were shot in different parts of the world from Austria and Switzerland to the US, the models were shot in a studio in East London. Aside from Clemens, part of the creative team on set was Christoph, our creative director, fashion stylist Alice Whiting, prop stylist Elena Riccabona, hair and make-up artist Brooke Neilson who all greatly contributed to the realization of the project with an exquisite selection of props, costumes and style.
Here are some snaps taken by Christoph during the shoot.
Our CGI artists created the missiles in Maya and added some texture (such as rust, dust and scratches) in Mari for extra reality.
Below are some screenshots from Maya.
And here are some screenshots from Mari.
After shooting the individual elements, Clemens created the layouts for each image. Following his directions, we started to assemble all the pieces from background to architecture, to the armament and the people. Here’s a short gif animation of how it all came together.
Photography: Clemens Ascher
Fashion Stylist: Alice Whiting
Props Stylist: Elena Riccabona
Hair and Make-up: Brooke Neilson
CGI Director: Christoph Bolten
CGI Artists: Kristian Turner, Richard Jenkinson, Florian Einfalt
Post Artists: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown, Riikka Eiro
We recently went with photographer Nick Meek to Paris and to lake Montriond in the French Alps to shoot the latest Nissan X-Trail campaign. The car and far backgrounds were captured photographically by Nick, whilst we built the architecture in CG.
Shot by the Wade Brothers this funny advertising campaign for the Ford Ka shows a woman who paints everything around her in pink, the colour of her new car.
The photographic duo contacted us because they needed a solution on how to change the colour of the house as they could neither paint it, nor shift the colours in post. In fact by doing this at the retouching stage the final result would have looked fake as all the diffused material on top of the brick work would have remained in place. As a solution we proposed to do a 3D-scan of the entire building to enable us to replace the painted parts of the house with a 3d model, and therefore adding the needed realism.
It has been a long time since we last published something in this category where we show our work in detail. We put a lot of work into making our CG images look real! We add lots of small elements both in CG and in post-production and most of them will never be seen unless you are zoomed in at 100%. Read more
