Making of "Gala Disco"

Bringing print media to TV.

The main challenge in creating the television spot, "Disco", for the magazine, Gala, was the short production time for the entire project. Nevertheless we quickly decided not to simply project existing print graphics onto geometry since this limited the overall scope of movement within the projection. It was absolutely necessary to model the entire disco world.

Using a number of arrays, the disco ball was quickly modelled, and a displacement shader was used to add the necessary irregularity to the surface. MoGraph was then used to easily clone the disco ball all around the room. Manual fine-tuning of the position of each ball was, of course, required. A total of 7000 individual six-sided glass squares for each disco ball resulted in 40,000 polygons for each ball. The room contained a total of forty disco balls, thereby resulting in a grand total of four million polygons for the disco balls alone! Low-poly objects were therefore used as substitutes for the disco balls and were replaced with the high-poly disco balls for the final rendering. This let us navigate the scene smoothly while finalizing it.

The shear endless number of reflections created by the disco balls proved to be a challenge. Numerous test renderings were necessary in order to achieve the optimal balance of render time and ray depth. In the end, we settled for a render time of around 30 min. per frame. Several render passes were used in compositing in order to achieve the right look for the disco balls. Additional rendered passes were used to add dust and scratches to top the look off.

The MoGraph module was especially helpful in speeding up the workflow for this project. Using the Array Effector We were able to quickly and intuitively fill the room with disco balls and a simple XPresso setup was added to easily create the required number of disco balls. Even though we were working with a tight schedule, these tools still gave us enough time to thoroughly concentrate on the "organic" camera movement, timing and the spots overall look.

Info:
www.sehsucht.de
www.gala.de

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