Brief Explanation

Tsingtao takes us on a grand journey on how their famous beer is made.

Creative Execution

Working on a tight deadline of a month in post, we realised that we would have to blend different visual effect approaches to achieve the grand scale that the client wanted. There wasn’t enough time to rely on one approach for everything. This was a challenge but also allows a freedom to experiment and be creative. We knew this mixed technique was possible though after having previously worked with Dylan in this way on other projects. We were involved from the early stages, including the storyboard/previs cut to help work out how the shots would be achieved or suggest other ideas. As the shot footage was a small part of the final tvc and the visuals were being created on the go, it was necessary to remain open and flexible throughout the project. As shots developed from storyboard drawn images into vfx shots, the emotion and pace of the tvc will naturally change, or suggest other directions. Almost every shot in the commercial had some post work done to it. This included: Full cg shots Live action plates comped onto matte paintings. Enhanced stock footage plates. To maintain the epic feel to the commercial we extended a lot of the backgrounds. Some of these were sourced from Dylan’s helicopter shoot, and some were stills of epic mountains. The stock footage had to be treated quite dramatically. This could involve stabilizing the camera move then re-projecting the footage into a new camera move scene. Sometimes the fg objects were rotoscoped and removed completely from the original bg. The landing eagle close up for example, had to be completed cut out from the bg so it could be added into a snow scene. The first part of the flyover of the snow capped mountains was taken from Dylan’s helicopter shoot. The bg mountains were taken from stock plate and projected onto the footage. Also we added particle snow effects for good measure. The project's success was largely to do with each party involved bring the highest of Special Effect skills to the table & with close collaboration between all parties at every stage of the process.