Brief Explanation

The ‘Megacity’ campaign is a creative concept which targets cosmopolitan male drinkers by capturing the excitement of the Asian Metropolis. The campaign marks the launch of the first Tiger global campaign and portrays Tiger as the symbol of the pulse and excitement of the Asian Megacity. Rise is the first of a suite of TVCs to air to the global market.

Creative Execution

The Tiger 'Rise' campaign saw Piranha Bar take on the job of creating nothing less than a fully digital city - a fictional hub of buzz and style surrounding a stunning Tiger Beer building. But introducing the new meant deconstructing the old and one of the first sequences features the split up of old cottages to make room for the growth of the new city. Location photography enabled us to reconstruct the old cottages digitally and complicated physics simulations allowed us to break it apart down the center using calculated destruction algorithms and turbulent dust simulation in 3D. This made room for the arrival of giant skyscrapers, street furniture, cars, a monorail and trees, all generated digitally. The main challenge with these shots is to capture the behavior of light across giant surfaces - every window on the buildings had to be minutely rotated so that it would return a slightly different reflection, contributing to the dappled, broken movement of light across glass surfaces at that scale for example. Animation was a challenge here, and we had to find a balance between obvious movement within a fast pan, and scale of movement that would be believable for large buildings. We then built the main pedestrian crossing shots, the first of which features a plate shot on location in Bangkok. It was very challenging to incorporate this still plate into a shot with a moving camera, and camera projection techniques were used to bring the live action into the CG move, distorting the footage so that it matches perfectly with the digital parallax. CG cars sit beside real ones, and rain soaked streets matched the location's unpredictable weather in this careful composite. Building the Tiger Beer center alone was a huge challenge - we glimpse it from the ground and from the air. We then have it rise from the ground in a shot which required intense collision detection to create the rubble that comes off it as it rises. From here the scope gets even more ambitious and we take in an aerial shot of the entire city with the Tiger building at it's core. Intricate road networks were built with proper traffic flow design before a 3D particle system was programmed to generate random vehicles that stay on the right side and do not crash into each other. Another challenge for this shot was creating a volumetric atmosphere layer where particles in the air are lit by the glow of the city below. Overall, this project used every rendering and compositing technique in the book. Advanced 3D physics provided a lot of the dust and rubble, custom designed and modeled city scapes complete with traffic plans brought the city to life in 3D while careful use of optical flares and light artifacts, and the sandwiching of hundreds of layers gave the footage a realistic night time look in the composite. Watch our making of video to see how the Megacity was really created from practically nothing! https://vimeo.com/64296253