SIXT - Find Your NirVana

SIXT – Find Your NirVana

We can always rely on Double Dice Films to give us a fun variety of jobs. This was no exception, a series of 3 short social ads featuring tradespeople experiencing blissful nirvana, on account of having rented vans from SIXT. There were a lot of different steps from start to finish here, from keying the footage to creating a believable 3D background, but we feel that they came together really cohesively.

Keying

Its rare that keying is an enjoyable process, but the team at Double Dice shot their greenscreen footage so well that it was an absolute dream this time. More or less as easy as one click for the majority of the footage, with an separate masked pass around the head and hair to capture the finer details.

After that, there was just a bit of manual masking around the bottom of the legs and feet to cut out the boxes the actors were sitting on. A couple required some repainting of shoes or trousers where things were cut off by the frame or caught under the box.

Compositing

The first step in the compositing process was to figure out what we were actually compositing the footage on to. We were after a nice, serene, cloudy sky, but after scouring all the usual stock libraries we just couldn’t find anything that was quite the right vibe. Instead, we cracked open our favourite cloud VDB pack and set up a 3D scene in Cinema4D. This gave us total control over things like the colour of the sky and clouds, as well as how quickly they moved. Another added benefit was we could render out different passes to give us some foreground and midground clouds that could pass in front of the filmed elements.

After that it was just a case of a bit of colour correction and a nice light wrap and we were all set, along with a reflection of the cloudy sky in the windscreen of the van. The last thing left was a few finishing touches to give each of the films a bit more personality. This included a bit of smoke on the electricians hair and adding the screen to the plumber’s phone.