Cannes Lions

Chemical Brothers 'Wide Open'

THE MILL , London / VIRGIN / 2016

Film
Film
Demo Film

Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Description

The enthralling promo uses a range of highly technical visual effects techniques, which are perfectly paired with the organic flow and movement of professional dancer Sonoya Mizuno.

This produces a captivating story that perfectly entwines with the iconic Chemical Brothers sound, featuring Beck.

Execution

The animation team worked to achieve the final effect by tracking the dancer’s movements in order to replace her limbs and eventually her whole torso with a lattice of 3D mesh.

Clean plates were created for seven thousand frames entailing a huge amount of traditional hand painted comp work.

To aid the process, the VFX team created a bespoke tool specifically for this project, which automatically scanned the final footage for clean parts of the set, projecting them onto the areas that the dancer occupied. This created a solution for the tracking of one continuous shot.

Photogrammetry scanning was used to create a fully CG model of the dancer’s body including photo real textures.

CG clothing was also built in Marvellous Designer and then rendered in Arnold.

Outcome

The promo is currently one of the most watched music videos online.

In the first 48 hours the video was viewed by over 800,000 people on YouTube and has sparked online discussions about technical execution.

It gained nation-wide press coverage including The Evening Standard, Pitchfork, Huh Magazine, Stereogum, Rolling Stone, The Drum, De Zeen and The Verge.

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