Director:
Seb Edwards
Production Company:
Park Pictures
Agency:
Droga5
Through several spots Spotify wanted to show how music makes us all feel and what it's like to be lost in the moment of a song.
In the 'For Music' spot The Mill's team had the challenge of building the environment - one that moves like ocean waves, yet is still recognizable as a crowd. It had to be both incredible and realistic. CG lead Wyatt Savarese and R&D artist Brenton Rayner explain, "Massive software played a huge role in creating shots where either the wave of people was in the distance behind a foreground live action plate, or where the entire shot is CG. It's not every day you get asked to build a literal sea of people. Massive is an amazing tool and looking at the results for Spotify we're glad we went forward with it. Creating a Massive-to-Maya pipeline also allowed the Mill artists to physically light crowd simulation in a mental ray environment and achieve the look Seb was after."
West Sarokin, Mill VXF supervisor comments, "The live action footage had such a strong cohesive look of flashing lights, flares, atmosphere, deep shadows and rim lighting that we had a very solid aesthetic direction for how we wanted to make the CG look so that it worked in the piece as a whole. And having 500 enthusiastic extras dancing for the duration of the shoot gave us a fantastic crowd to build on and composite with the CG elements we created."
The Mill team worked very closely with agency and director on all spots in the campaign to come up with a creative solution, technique, look and game plan to make such a challenging project a reality.
"From shoot to ship was a mere three weeks. An incredible amount of passion, hard work, skill and above all else creativity was needed. It's a collaboration we were thrilled to be involved in and we're all very pleased with the end result," said Sean Costelloe, The Mill's Head Of Production, New York.
So switch on, tune in and listen.
Agency: Droga5
Producer: Ben Davies
Creative Director: David Droga
Creatives: Neil Heymann, Graham Douglas
Account Director: Tenny Pearson
Copywriter: Spencer Lavallee
Creative Mutant: Kenny Kim
Production Company: Park Pictures
Director: Seb Edwards
Executive Producers: Jackie Kelman, Justin Pollock
Producer: Caroline Kousidonis
Director of Photography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Editing Company: Trim Edit & Cosmo Street Editorial
Editor: Tom Lindsay
Edit Assist: Mark Potter
VFX & Design: The Mill
Executive Producer: Sean Costelloe
VFX Producer: Lily Tilton
Shoot Supervisor: Westley Sarokin
3D Lead Artist: Wyatt Savarese
Massive Artists: Wyatt Savarese, Hassan Taimur, Edward Hicks
R&D: Brenton Rayner
2D Lead Artists: Nathan Kane, Westley Sarokin
2D Artists: Burtis Scott, Tony Robins, Jade Kim
3D Artists: Vince Baertsoen, Raymond Leung, Laurent Giaume, Bogdan Mihajlovic, Ross Scroble, Sean Curran, John Wilson, Jeff Lopez