Mass FX and agency, Vladimir Jones, team up to help American Indian college students weather the storm of funding uncertainty on the horizon. From the initial brief and rough boards, we knew this campaign would have a huge impact for the American Indian students.

To bring it to life, we were brought on board ahead of production to ensure a smooth process from the shoot through post. During pre-production we created the CG landscapes to match the tribal land of each ambassador. We prepared a rough build of each environment to preview the composites during the shoot to better direct the performances and camera movement.

One of the unique challenges of this shoot was that the talent were running in place on a treadmill on the stage. This allowed for lighting and wardrobe continuity, but created a challenge in post: we needed to blend the camera motion from the shoot and augment it to feel like the camera was running with the talent. The speed of the camera move would sell (or break) the illusion of the shot to feel like the talent was walking in the environment.

Following the shoot, we began dialing in each environment to pace with the edit and begin the more detailed compositing work on each shot. Unreal Engine was a great tool for the environment builds. We could direct lighting, wind, and audition camera placement while working in near real-time. Those final environment renders passed to our team of Nuke artists to integrate the talent, replace the sky system, and bring on the rain.

We used a blend of CG clouds out of Unreal Engine and custom digital matte paintings to bring the storm to life and allow for flexible directability as we iterated through storm systems to find the right fit for each spot.

We worked with the wardrobe and production designers to create a practical rained-on look for the talent. Then we added CG rain in the composites and were able to direct the distant sheeting rain, midground particle systems, and foreground rain interacting with the talent. We opted to use Nuke’s native particle system to give the compositors the most control over the density and forces on the rain in comp.

We brought the final polish to the spots in the color grade. We were able to do one final pass of balancing between shots, storm systems, and additional beauty fixes. Our compositing team was close at hand to supply our colorist with all of the DI mattes needed to dynamically address color notes for each piece of the composite.

In the end, we stayed comfy and dry but will never look at a thunderstorm the same. Working on VFX really makes you a keen observer of the real world and appreciate how complex nature really is.