DNB Eurobonus - VFX breakdown

Apart from being a race against time with only three weeks production, this show was exciting and fun from start to finish. Director Thomas Hilland approached us with a script that challenged all departments of our studio, and since we're rigged for this type of shows it was a perfect match for us, and an opportunity to once again collaborate with Einar Film. At the same time as VFX-Supervisor Morten Moen and Head of CG Espen Nordahl attended the three days long shoot in Prague, we modeled about 50 CG assets from scratch, and started look development on the FX clouds which was solved in Houdini by FX Lead Magnus Pettersson.

Parts of the bridge were built for real and filmed in Prague. This would basically be the stuff she steps on. We also filmed the girl walking on green boxes for some shots where we would supply all the elements in the bridge. For the scenes in the apartment we painstakingly recreated objects from the set as CG models so that we could animate them as they fly through the room and build the first part of the bridge.

All in all we built 97 different objects as CG models and each of these were finished in four different colours and textures so that we had a total of 388 different looking objects to play around with. This was necessary as a huge amount of stuff was needed to fill up the large sections of bridge visible in the widest shots. Some of the shots show an enormous stretch of bridge. For instance in the shot where she climbs out of the window and the camera tilts up the CG bridge was built to be 500 meters high. This was made possible by writing specialised tools that let us draw up a curve where the bridge should go and that would then populate the bridge with random objects. These objects would then be manually changed or moved according to the directors needs.

We were also called upon to produce en entire cityscape of Paris in CG for the shot where the girl descends among Parisian rooftops. This shot needed to convey the idea that we are in fact in Paris, so a lot of research went into finding what defines a Parisian roof and skyline.

This film turned out to be one of the most fun and fulfilling projects we have had and it was a great pleasure helping director Thomas Hilland, Einar Film and the client realise this epic journey amongst the clouds.