Girls Aloud 'Untouchable'

"Five glass spheres fall at impossible speeds towards Earth. Protected within these futuristic force fields, Girls Aloud descend through space and time". The first line of director Marco Puig's treatment was enough of a hook to make us want to be involved in the Girls' latest promo.

 

An ambitious but beautiful film, we needed to split the VFX work into pre and post shoot. Marco wanted to do as much in camera as possible, so using back projection we created much of the space-scapes before the shoot, and cut them into three films - back projection, side projection and reflection projection to put onto the glass spheres. After the shoot, we needed to create a number of dramatic and exciting wide shots, such as the pods entering the earth's atmosphere, as seen from the earth's orbit, streaking through the sky narrowly avoiding an airplane and burning up like meteors hurtling towards the planet's surface. All of this with the 5 girls dancing raunchily in their pods!

 

The schedule was incredibly tight, and the entire job was turned around in 2 weeks, including the shoot, edit, design, VFX and grade. VFX Artist Paul O'Brien and Designer Darren Agnew created all of the material prior to the shoot, with Darren VFX Supervising on set. Paul then led the rest of the project, doing the majority of the VFX work. Avtar Bains and George Roper contributed on a couple of shots, the 3D plane was created by Martin Bovingdon and the stunning grade was done by colourist Simon Bourne. The promo was produced by Executive Producer Simon Whalley and the production assistant was Magdalena Przezdziecka.

 

The promo was aired on Channel 4 in an 'Exclusive' and high profile time slot on Wednesday 25th March, immediately after Desperate Housewives, to a large audience.