Hugo Boss 'Night'

Framestore has just completed intense CG and 2D VFX for the latest Hugo Boss commercial, Night. Starring Fight Club’s Jared Leto and directed by RSA’s Jonas Akerlund, the spot shows a New York night being turned upside down by a bottle of Hugo Boss.

Framestore’s main creative challenges were making the spinning city transitions work well with Akerlund's fast-paced edit and transforming the shoot’s predominately greenscreen lighting into urban night time.

Jonathan Hairman supervised the shoot on location in New York, filming and collating a large amount of 5D footage, timelapse and stills to help the VFX team back in London construct the city in post.

The creative was sketched-out during the offline stage. Mark Beardall created previs tests of city rotation effects and went on to develop these into the finished shots. He used Hairman's New York material to build a city from 2D cut-outs and geometries, combining textures and projections inside Flame to work a variety of angles.  The city atmosphere was enhanced with additional elements such as reflections, smoke, street lights and lens flares.

Robert Harrington led the CG team and was responsible for rebuilding CG Hugo Boss bottles plus developing three complex sequences: the stairwell, pillar and street.

The live action stairwell had to be animated to convey how the Hugo Boss bottle was controlling the men’s night out. Richard Coley modelled and textured a single flight of stairs, which was then extended and animated down ten stories to a CG ground floor. After working in extra dirt, the sequence was shaded and lit in Mental Ray, with 2D motion-blur added in Nuke.

The shots of men walking through pillars were built from multiple greenscreens, which required an environment. A corridor of floor-lit marble pillars was modelled, with rotoscopes of the actors projected on invisible cards between the pillars to create shadow interaction.

The street-flip sequence was created by re-projecting two location photos. Buildings were baked onto geometry but the roads, pavements and lampposts were replaced in CG and the cars were moved onto animated polys. The street photo itself was fed back through Nuke, adding dynamic range to boost reflections on the wet ground. The apartment was similarly re-projected. To address parallax-issues, its dark hallway was replaced in Maya.

As if that weren’t enough, additional VFX work included disguising location rain, crowd duplication plus beauty and fashion work. The grade was crafted by both Dave Ludlam and Stefan Perry who teamed up to create a gold and blue look.