I’ve never put together a blog post like this before, but this project was so extensive and so much fun that I wanted to try and pull together my work from this project and write this post. This post will act as both a VFX process diary and journal entry at the same time.

me - james choe - @jameschoe - vfx artist

This campaign was led by director Natasha Foster and producer Georgia Moraitis | Entropico Films and Agency CHEP. It has been one of my greatest work experiences and it has tremendously rewarding to get to work so closely with Tash and Georgia on this project. Thanks to these two, I’ve been having the time of my life.

SEE THE MAIN VIDEO BELOW

Starting with

ROWI SINGH - @RowiSingh

The concept for the campaign was to show the “FLIPSIDE” of each person, and this meant envisioning a unique new world for each of them. Tash envisioned for this gorgeous floral world for Rowi and one of the many questions we had early in preproduction was how we were going to integrate the live action with the fantastical.

The original look of the flower world for Rowi was designed by an incredible artist (who I unfortunately cannot name), and it was important for us to maintain this look as much as possible.
We initially considered trying to integrate this design with a real bed of flowers but decided pretty quickly that this wouldn’t work because we would never be able to get the real flowers to match close enough with the CG design to be seamless.

After that, the main question was how we would integrate it with the camera movement. I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to shoot the commercial and so I set out to do some tests. I asked my friend Yura Cho to stand in for me and I shot this. I intentionally tried to make it as difficult as possible so that I could be sure that I wouldn’t mess it up in the real video and so I shot the below handheld, with a long sweeping camera move that starts close in, and comes out to a wide. I learned pretty quickly that Tash does do crazy camera moves and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get in the way of that.

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The above image is what Rowi’s world looks like in the 3D software. Each cube is representative of a unique flower design that grows in the shot. I did the math and the amount of flower models in this scene is 2 million.

There was a bit of a paradox to this scene. It was a very intensive and heavy scene to produce, but it was quite an easy one to do. The process itself was somewhat straightforward

For the butterfly eyes, we had an LED lightbulb to emulate the colour of the glow.

An initial concept for Rowi’s eye/butterfly.

VINCENT LIM @DIMSIMLIM

Director Tash had this crazy idea. “What if his noodles turned into gold chains. Is that possible?”
I didn’t know if it was possible, but fuck yeah I wanted to figure it out.

In the above section on Rowi, I said that the paradox was that it was a heavy scene, but an easy one to make. Vincent’s scene was the other way around. The amount of 3D elements (gold chains, coins and lucky cat) was quite a lot less than the 2 million flowers in Rowi’s scene. However, the specificity of the magic we had to create made this one hard to design, but light on the computer.

The very first thing I did was start experimenting with simulations of rope and how I would go about transforming them into gold chains. In these simulations, I was primarily relying on making changes to the GRAVITY in the virtual space.
The scene would start out with a gravity that was accurate to earth (an acceleration of 9.8m per second.) Then at the right moment, I changed the gravity to be something like -50m per second so that the noodles start to float.
(see experiments in video below).

Once I figured this out in CG space, the next question I had to resolve was how I would go about putting this into live action footage. The concern I had was that I would have to track 2 completely seperate things at the same time. 1, the camera motion had to track so that I could put 3d elements into the scene properly. 2, I needed to also track the chopsticks that were to be held by the subject.

I got my friend Candy Park right after she’d finished teaching a dance class to sit in for me; and again, I attempted to make this difficult for myself by handholding the camera rather than have it stationary.
The test came out way better than expected - and became the process that I followed for the final video.

me and vincent! We’ve known each other for a while, and so it was very cool to be on this project together.

DAN BROWN - @SIMPLYDAN

Dan’s scene was primarily reliant on the production design of mirrored plinths so there wasn’t too much for me to do around him. However, you can never have enough mirrored plinths, so I added in more.

Dan was incredibly fun to watch on set.

OTHER MISCELLANEOUS WORK

Before we had locked in a location and set design, Tash was considering creating a set similar to what she had done previously on a Marvel X Pandora commercial. During this phase of preproduction, I created something along those lines in 3D and started creating animations within this set.

Portal Projection

I completely forgot I had made this.
Tash’s concept for the video was that as the phone opens up, a portal would open in the background which would symbolize our movement into the FLIP world.
We designed this together over the course of a month, and it ended up looking so cool in the video. I didn’t anticipate how many revisions we would go through and I think I counted over 30 unique portal designs that I ended up creating.

For the projections, we were lucky to get the help of TDC - Technical Direction Company. These are the guys responsible for the projections all over Sydney CBD during the annual Vivid light show, and also the projections during Sydney’s NYE celebrations. They’re also involved in a lot of hollywood movies; their latest being Thor: Love and Thunder.
Cinematographer Tony Luu and I visited TDC to test these projections. Tony was there testing to see how the projections would appear on his Arri Alexa while I was just chilling there, having the time of my life. Tony also gave me a present of led tracking markers! Fucking cool. I was so happy.

PHOTOS FROM SET

Left to right, Producer Georgia Moraitis, Executive Producer Ainslee Littlemore and Director Natasha Foster

Agency CHEP Family - Jackson Ainsworth, Raisa Mushrafi and Alex Campbell from Samsung

Choreographer Sela Vai! We had never met before but we have a lot of friends in common. Meeting Sela for the first time felt like reconnecting with an old friend.

Me and director Tash

Two of the insane camera rigs led by DOP Tony Luu

my friend Candy Park who visited us on set and shot a lot of these BTS photos.

* I’ve probably forgotten a number of things so if I remember anything, I might update this post as I go.