Zedd 'Lucky'
It’s always a pleasure to collaborate with friends, so when Carl Addy and Ben Smith at The Mayda Collective approached us, we jumped at the chance.
Sep 30, 2024
3 min read
Director: Carl Addy + Ben Smith
Prod. Company: Mayda Collective
Musician: Zedd
Client: Universal Music
When Carl Addy and Ben Smith first brought this to us, we said yes before they'd even finished the pitch. It was exactly the kind of project we'd been looking for — a chance to push into territory our clients don't usually associate us with and try things we'd never tried before.
The creative hook that got us most excited was the camera work. We proposed shooting with an Insta360 alongside an Alexa — both rigged on the same rod — inspired by Little Planet-style distortion, with the idea of reframing and warping the footage into something that felt genuinely unhinged. The shoot was a single day in LA, which, in retrospect, was ambitious given everything that followed.
Once the edit was locked, the real work began. We gonna split the shots focusing on the characters and environments while Mayda did the reflections and the tongue and balloon sections.
We built the environment in 3D, added vegetation, and rendered 360 panoramas of the full sequence — enormous resolution, painfully slow renders. The compositing itself was manageable, but manipulating the camera distortion at the same time made it exponentially harder. That pushed us to rethink our pipeline entirely: animation and testing in Cinema 4D and After Effects, then everything packaged as Redshift proxies, shipped to Houdini on the cloud, and rendered on our farm. Final renders came back into After Effects to replace the preview — clean, if not exactly simple.
One unexpected wrinkle: our usual camera tracking partners in India had no experience with 360 footage, so we had to bring that work in-house. Glad we had the experience to do it, but it wasn't something we'd planned for.
The whole thing was a serious creative lift — experimental transitions, 3D and comp pushed into Insta360 footage, motion design layered throughout, and a lot of collective head-scratching along the way. But the result is something genuinely beautiful, and that made every render worth waiting for.
I want to thank the guys at Mayda and, obviously, Universal Music for the opportunity because it was truly fun to execute.