The Night Club
Framestore is proud to have worked with renowned director Juan Cabral at MJZ and ad agency Mother on a magical new ad for IKEA that celebrates all that is wonderful about going to bed.
Cut to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, the 90 sec spot follows a bunch of young people all dressed up and heading to a “nightclub” with a difference. Once inside, clubbers find a dimly lit interior with coloured lights, a DJ spinning tunes and a bar serving cocktails. So far, so nightclub. But instead of a dancefloor, this club has rows of comfy underlit beds into which all the partygoers eventually retire – after having a drink, brushing their teeth, and donning earplugs and silk eye masks. With everyone sleeping soundly, the club takes on a magical quality. A wide angled shot of the club then shows six sheep leaping into the air from each side of the venue’s mezzanine level where they magically transform into glittering clouds of confetti which twinkle gently down on to the happily slumbering party guests.
While Framestore's various VFX responsibilities on the spot included designing motion graphics that could play on the nightclub's main screen, subtle environment clean-up and digital matte painting work to the exterior scenes – the main challenge was to create CG sheep that could explode into showers of confetti, and make sure that all CG elements integrated seamlessly and invisibly with Juan’s in-camera narrative.
As well as designing and building a photoreal sheep in Houdini using a raft of specially shot reference footage and photography, Framestore built a complex lighting rig matching the on-set lighting in order to be able to control and manipulate the lighting of the CG shots. Carefully handling the moment that the sheep burst into confetti also required a deft touch.
'We filmed indoor confetti fireworks exploding on set and it was brilliant to have that reference material when we came to create and render the confetti stars in 3D,’ says Framestore's CG Lead Alex Doyle. ‘By doing it in CG we could have much more control over it and have confetti emerging from the silhouette rather than just a single point explosion. Making a CG sheep explode silently in a magical burst of glitter was a big challenge. The way we solved this was to put a lot of work into the transition from sheep to clouds of glitter, texturally blending the confetti from sheep texture over a few frames. It happens in an instant – but we wanted to create a transition that felt both magical and celebratory.'
It then fell to Framestore’s Compositing team to integrate the CG into the scene, using the rendered elements to craft the transition from sheep to confetti, bedding everything into the atmospheric plates by creating volumetric shadows through the light rays, and creating a balanced shimmering of the confetti elements within the complex lighting setup. All of Framestore's work involved the careful consideration of realism and the dream-like nature of the film’s narrative.
'Juan wanted to shoot something magical,’ says Jordi Bares, Framestore’s Creative Director and shoot Supervisor. ‘We tried to respect the story first and foremost as a joyous celebration of going to bed – and make sure we didn't turn it into a VFX festival. Both MJZ and the agency, Mother, really trusted us with this project and they allowed Juan to build his world as he envisioned it. I think the finished ad is fantastic and very well balanced in the sense that the filming, the story, the music, the VFX, the editing all come together seamlessly to bring a magical idea to life. It's one of those jobs you feel lucky to have worked on.'
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