The Limebike Feeling

A little while ago we were approached with a very interesting proposition, some VFX heavy, social focused clips intended to work as guerilla marketing for various clients. The first of these, called ‘The Limebike Feeling’, was described to us as ‘a nod to crazy Snapchat / hood clips, putting a spin on artists teasing music in their cars’. The artist in question this time was AntsLive promoting the track Alexa.

The concept was simple, Ant and his mates are in a car filming their promo, when suddenly one of them spots something out of the window. A chap on a Limebike, living his best life, cruising along the motorway at impossible speeds. We switch back to the guys in the car to get their reaction, before they turn to back to the biker who has now overtaken them. As he pulls away in front, his tires lift off the ground and he takes off E.T. style, eventually disappearing from view.

Simple right? For the side view at least, it sort of was. Get a clean plate from the perspective of the car window looking straight across the left-hand lanes, then another plate of our extraterrestrial cyclist on a blue screen. After a bit of Keylight magic in After Effects we were nearly there, just needed to layer the car door back on top along with some colour correction and extra shadows to help sell the effect.

The front view was a bit more complicated. Firstly, due to the curvature of the road and the changing perspective as our cyclist pulled away further we wouldn’t be able to use a bluescreen plate. That left our new favourite toy, the 3D scan. Since we’d only ever see him from the back (and at speed) on this shot, the scan didn’t need to be top quality, which was lucky as his clothes and the bike were pretty reflective so there were a few issues in the mesh (let alone his nightmare face, as you can see below!).

Adobe Mixamo’s autorigger kindly took care of our rigging needs in about 30 seconds, giving us free reign to try out some different mocap.

In the end though, we opted to hand animate the cycling loop as it gave us much more freedom and allowed us to tackle feedback more easily.

After that, it was tracking time. This scene was one of the hardest to track we’ve ever contended with. A very smooth road surface, an overcast sky and a lot of moving objects meant all of the trackers we tried had very little to latch on to. Eventually we were able to isolate a short segment without too many wobbles, and with a bit of manual tweaking we got something pretty good. Then it was render with Octane in Cinema4D, and back to After Effects for the final comp.

The guys behind the production then uploaded and downloaded from Snapchat for some authentic compression, and we had a really effective final result!