Vodafone 'Interstellar Rescue'
Which is the best place to do spaceships? Framestore, that is for sure.
Mar 13, 2018
3 min read
Director: Jeff Low
Agency: Ogilvy
Production: Biscuit Filmworks
Client: Vodafone
After Gravity, a really hard act to follow for sure, we did embark in building this piece to take the viewers through a journey in space.
Tons of research on the ISS for inspiration and building a credible, futuristic yet very close to our times spaceship.
Approach
We teamed up with a fantastic team and embarked on building a hyper-realistic astronaut and spaceship to take the audience to what they were meant to understand as a film trailer, only to be surprised by the fact that it was a game all along.
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And we downloaded a ton of NASA open source 3D assets to inform ourselves before asking our film counterparts, which, obviously, had them done to perfection, but, as you can imagine, were way too heavy for us and prohibitive in the little time we had in front. Not to mention that those assets are the property of someone and we are not allowed to use them as they are.
From previsualization, design, modelling to FX, lighting and rendering, I saw Framestore's advertising pipeline in action, and to my surprise, the similarities with film were astonishing, certainly less strict, but the concepts were so similar it was really great.
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After many, many hours, lots of people working hard, we added the textures, shading, and rigging and brought the asset to the highest level possible within our timeframe.
And yes, the level of detail was insane; we even had bots everywhere, and it was thanks to top artists and a very clever Arnold's scene setup that we could manage such enormous assets easily and render these.
During the project, we also added tons of little FX, from the main thrusters inspired by the latest Ion Thrusters developed by NASA to contact and air details of the airlock that really had to be there to make it believable.
high-end
And finally, we also worked on the UI graphics on the screen, so we understand the high-end qualities of the game.
All in all it was a great experience, lots of hard work and a few late days, but worth it.