Durex / Earth Shattering

Challenged to create a look to meet the Director's ideas for suggesting the female orgasm through visual effects, this project demanded a large degree of creative collaboration. From an early stage, we worked closely with Truman & Cooper to conceptualise and design the visual effects.

The vision was to have the orgasm sequence start with an exploding room, and in order to make this a very sensual moment our 3D Artist Alaric Holberton developed a paper-like weight and texture to the exploding particles. The explosion was pre-visualised extensively and the camera move was decided prior to shooting, then matched on set.

Judy Roberts used Flame to design and test colour textures spreading over skin, with a lot of pre-shoot testing to help decide the best approach for shooting. The landscape was designed and built in flame as a large scale layered matte painting, with the addition of CGI skies.

Colourist Duncan Russell was also involved at the pre-production stage testing colourising effects in the Baselight and to advise on lighting techniques. 

'What starts as a fairly straightforward 'business time' situation quickly becomes a mind bending altered state of pleasure to portray a female orgasm. The guys had used beautiful coloured gels on set, this gave me a wonderful starting point to help convey using colour the sensations that our lucky lady experiences. We had a lot of fun playing with iridescent solarisation, flipping things into negative, splitting out the RGB channels and animating them apart from each other. We also used colour wash passes so that 2D could animate them as blooming drops of watercolour on her skin. It's a very dense commercial, there are a lot of ideas crammed into the last 20 seconds.'

In the words of the diner lady in When Harry Met Sally, "I'll have what she's having."