VFX Supervisor Dave Hempstead on constructing a full CG storm environment for Uniqa’s latest spot

What was the brief for this project? 

For this commercial, we were tasked with creating a full CG monochrome storm environment, which envelopes our hero characters and transforms them from black and white into full colour versions of themselves.

Did the team encounter any challenges?

The biggest challenge for this project was making the storm feel tangible and real, while maintaining an other-worldly feel and appearance. A great deal of this believability was tackled collaboratively on set with practical SFX, which we then augmented and enhanced with the aid of simulated CG storm walls and cloudscapes rendered on a massive scale.

This was a high concept project where the marriage between monochrome and full colour world had to be feathered into one another with a great deal of care and attention. This transition effect, where our characters are revealed into full colour, was the product of much research and development.

The project was something of a paradox in that while our storm had to feel both benevolent and chaotic, it also had to allow us to stop and take in some intimate moments, to marvel at the abstract phenomenon befalling our protagonists, and appreciate the vastness of the world in which they find themselves.

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