Sky Cinema enlists production company Blinkink and visual effects specialists nineteentwenty to deliver their Christmas movie premieres in one seamless winter wonderland.
Sky Cinema’s new Christmas campaign sees their December movie premieres revealed through the windows of a magical advent calendar. The enchanted campaign is led by a 40-second spot, which began airing on November 5th during Saturday’s X Factor show.
Taking the viewer on a journey from door to door, each revealing a blockbuster title, the new spot is promoting Sky Cinema’s Christmas schedule, which boasts a new premiere every night in December.
Visual effects specialists nineteentwenty were tasked with creating a magical snowy wonderland and the unique advent calendar, with each door designed to match the movie it reveals. Integrating clips from The Jungle Book, The Revenant, Deadpool and Zootopia, nineteentwenty created a seamless camera move between the movies and their new Christmassy surroundings.
“This was a great project to be a part of, but like all good briefs -- this one presented some unique challenges!” explains Ludo Fealy, Co-founder and VFX supervisor, nineteentwenty. “One long camera move is tricky in any form, but one that must seamlessly link between cameras and lenses from different movies bought a much bigger challenge. The fact that it all takes place in a fully CG environment is great, as it provides much more freedom.”
“We had two amazing teams working all hours in London and Bristol to create this magical world from scratch, and seeing it all come together over the last month has been incredible,” comments Blinkink producer Joshua Smith. “We are blown away by the finished result and we could not have achieved this without nineteentwenty’s dedication to the project.”
“We were also tasked with designing and building the 24 fully-CG doors within a snowy world,” says Chris King, Head of 3D at nineteentwenty, explaining the technical aspects of the project. “It took a huge effort from planning, through previs, concept, design, build, look development, light render and finally to composite. We were rendering trees with over 200 million curves, plus a village of houses lit by around 1000 lights, and all it was possible to get rendered before the tight deadline. The Houdini volume rendering and our ever growing VDB cloud library meant dressing the floating doors with magical misty clouds was possible without overrunning our schedule or render farm.”
Source: nineteentwenty
