Our friends at Spark Media invited us to collaborate on a special Christmas project for fragrance experts, The Perfume Shop. Our job was to design a 3D winter wonderland, where we find characters shopping for the perfect gifts.
Style: 3D/CG, Compositing
Client: Spark Media, The Perfume Shop
Year: 2022
The Project
Spark and The Perfume Shop wanted to create an ad about a customer being transported into a magical wintery world. A world filled with giant fragrance bottles. Second Home had three key involvements in the project. Firstly, to consult on the VFX during the live action shoot. To design an environment for the products to live. And lastly, to composite the elements together.
Spark provided us with live action footage of the customer, a Perfume Shop expert, extras and the scene props. Everything was shot on green screen with markers, ensuring the subject could be keyed out and tracked accurately in post-production.
3D Modelling
The stars of the show were 6 perfume bottles, which needed to stand tall in the environment around our characters. It was decided that we would need to generate realistic 3D models for each fragrance to place in the scenes.
Using photogrammetry, we created 3D base models of each of the bottles. Next, in Maya each model was cleaned and tweaked as necessary to match the proportions of the original bottle. We captured multiple images to use as reference when going through the process of look-development for each bottle. This was to ensure logos, colours and sizing were exact and that we stayed true to their respective branding. Once the bottles were approved, they were ready to be positioned.
A low-lying sunset was created in Photoshop, and a snowy ground was artworked for each scene. Snow mounds were added around the bases of the bottles to help incorporate them into the environment. Once complete in Photoshop, they were handed over for compositing.
Post-Production
All rushes delivered by Spark’s live-action shoot were tracked so they could be composited with all other components in Nuke. In post, we combined all our prepared elements. For example, the sky, snow, bottles, characters, props and general atmospheric features.
3D trees were layered into each scene. Their reflections and shadows were introduced on the bottles for some added realism. Atmospheric features used included sparkle, glow and even a shooting star for a magical Christmassy atmosphere. In the live footage, characters were filmed walking on snow. Therefore, footsteps on the real snow needed to be blended into the digitally artworked ground.
The client wanted the perfume spray to be the motif / transition point into the snow globe. To achieve this, we layered up sparkles in the spray. We then led them to create the stars in the sky in the subsequent scene. Similar sparkle transitions were used to create a tracked text reveal on a perfume bottle. For the final shot, we added a crash zoom to take us back to reality. Our fantasy world needed to be neatly contained inside a snow globe Christmas tree decoration.