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
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
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
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
