CGI director Thorsten Jasper Weese and CGI artist Inez Budzyńska in the Stuttgart studio have had some fun playing with a CG hot air balloon. The balloon itself was originally created for another series of images but only featured in the distance. They loved the look of it so much they decided to re-purpose it as the hero in its own little story. They came up with the idea of making it appear in ordinary urban settings as if the shots were taken through a window. They wanted to create a dreamy effect where the ordinary and plausible would be combined with the uncommon and improbable. Read more
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
This is yet another image we have created in collaboration with photographer Markus Wendler for the series “The Dark Side of Los Angeles” which visually narrates ambiguous stories in downtown LA. The vintage cars appearing in each image are completely created in CG.
For this one we used a classic Chevrolet Camaro. Markus photographed the backplate, whilst we shot the models against a green screen and we then comped them into our CG car.
Below is how we assembled all together.
It is a welcome change of subject for us to work on old and used cars as we need to add lots of extra details which are at the opposite end of the perfect glossy surfaces we are used to work on. So here for example we had to add condensation on the car windows, scratches, dust, rust, worn tyres and finger prints. All details which make a car look real!
Photographer: Markus Wendler
CGI-Director: Christoph Bolten
CGI-Artists: Kristian Turner, Richard Jenkinson, Simon Watts, Dariusz Makowski
Post-Artists: Kate Booker, Riikka Eiro, Pepe Alram
Honda’s endless quest to communicate a never ending commitment to performance and quality has translated into this brilliant Droste effect advertising campaign. The Droste effect is an optical illusion whereby a picture appears repeated within itself in an endless way. Created both as a TV commercial and a print campaign, we worked with photographer Nick Meek to create a set of 3 images in which, every time, a smaller version of the image is repeated within a billboard forever showing the same.
Our CGI director Christoph Bolten worked from the earliest pitching stage with Nick and the team from McGarryBowen to help bringing it all together. He travelled to Spain with the crew to pre-visualise the car on set and to capture the lighting environment for all shots by shooting HDR spheres – see snapshots below.
Once back in London, our 3d-Artist Florian Einfalt created the billboards and power lines, making sure to add enough imperfections and signs of age to have them blend credibly with the landscape. Post-Artist Pepe Alram then created the final composition and look – and this is how he did it:
Above: a gif animation showing the optical illusion of the Droste effect.
CREDITS:
Client: Honda
Agency: McGarryBowen
Creative Director: Angus MacAdam
Art Director: Holly Fallow, Charlotte Watmough
Photographer: Nick Meek
CGI Director: Christoph Bolten at Recom Farmhouse
CGI Artists: Florian Einfalt, Kristian Turner at Recom Farmhouse
Post Artist: Pepe Alram at Recom Farmhouse
We recently worked on a portfolio project for Japanese born, Los Angeles based photographer Toshi Oku. We were very happy with the results of this unusual choice of colours and we thought to share! Well done Toshi!
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
The Nissan All-Mode campaign has been a great opportunity for us to test our creativity in using a variety of source material. TBWA’s brief was to place each of the Nissan 4×4 vehicles in a location where the tracks of the car would mimic an element of the surrounding landscape.
We constantly had to vary the approach depending on the availability of images, so each final image became a different combination of CGI landscapes, landscapes we photographed, CGI cars and stock imagery. Below is a making-of to show how the Nissan Pathfinder has been assembled together from beginning to end.
See the campaign on our site here
CREDITS:
Client: Nissan
Agency: TBWA G1
Associate Creative Director: Fabian Braun
Art Director: Matthieu Darrasse
CGI Director: Kristian Turner at Recom Farmhouse
CGI Artist: Kristian Turner, Richard Jenkinson at Recom Farmhouse
Post Artist: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown at Recom Farmhouse
Jewellery story “Touched For The Very First Time” was photographed by Monica Menez using jewellery from designers Vanessa Baroni, Jasmina Jovy and Galen Guld. To enhance the pastels and soft look of the images we created these multi coloured backgrounds with Monica. Hope you enjoy the subtle nuances of the series!
