Snapchat - The Fun Starts With Yellow

It’s Euros time again and Snapchat are getting their weird on.

Even if you’ve never used it before you’ve seen its wacky filters somewhere or other, it’s HUGE! Which is why it was a pleasant surprise when creative agency Dark Horses contacted us for some animated elements and post production work for a new Snapchat campaign. 

As if that wasn’t enough they brought with them one of our favourite directors Claire Norowzian of ITV Euros 2020, Mindfood and The Lego Foundation fame. Time for our fourth project with Claire and another winner.

We headed over for the shoot to VFX supervise for a full day of Snapchat madness. Normally we’d expect to produce most of the VFX work on a project we supervised, however in this instance all the wild faces we see came directly from Snapchat, who took cropped edits of every person in the scene and applied their filters directly over the top, with frankly some pretty impressive face tracking software! 

Tying in with the Euros 2024 the main film takes place in the midst of a crowd of footy supporters cheering a televised game. We push through the crowd and further still through the TV, landing on the ref who issues us a yellow card courtesy of some trickery of the Grizzle crew. 

We bungee backwards out through the mouth of one of the crowd who are now a sea of wacky and wonderful Snapchat filters.

Here the camera whips to one side and we branch off into one of 4 clips, each featuring a different kind of football fan. All nicely rounded off by our final lockup, in which if you’ve got a good eye you can spot most of the Grizzle team and Claire.

Our main role outside of cleanup of the filters and final compositing was the entire transition centering around the TV screen and the final lock up. We had to key out the ref from a green backplate, composite him onto a CG football pitch and then composite the whole lot back onto the TV for when we push into the screen.

But this wasn’t just any yellow card. Our referee channelled Stretch Armstrong to send his Snapchat branded card careening towards the camera. We considered a lot of options here, maybe using rotoscoped video frames or still photos of the hand and only having the arm be 3D, even buying some 3D stock of a hand and animating that. All in all though, the best option seemed to be a 3D scan of the real hand holding the card. We positioned our referee in an evenly lit room, got him a lightstand to rest his arm on, and spent an awkward few minutes prowling around him with an iPhone to capture his hand from every conceivable angle. The app Polycam was great here, and made the process really easy. We captured a few options just in case, then released our (incredibly patient) referee. In the end the card itself was too reflective to capture properly, but its digital remains were easy enough to cut out from the scan and replace with a fully CG card.

One extra consideration was what to show on the screen before the push in. Originally the football pitch was floating in an abstract black void, but all that darkness looked a little unnerving, let alone incongruous with the bright, cheerful tone of the rest of the film! Since we couldn’t use any specific football stadiums, the best option seemed to be making one of our own. The stadium would only be visible for a couple of seconds, nestled on the TV screen in the back of frame, which meant we could get away with a lot when it came to modelling and texturing without spending hours on minor details. As long as the broad shapes and colours read as a stadium, it would still have the desired effect.