BMW / Joy Wins / Behind the Scenes

Not only did we create the London Olympic Stadium with full crowds and it’s surrounds. The 60” commercial also involved us completing 24 Massive software crowd shots for three different stadiums throughout the commercial, matte paintings and dressings for other shots throughout.

At the time of making the commercial, the London stadium was still in early stages of development with very limited access, so we used construction plans and reference material supplied by LOCOG to accurately replicate it. A second Olympic stadium was designed and created in house at Freefolk for alternative versions.

The stadiums both sit in a matte painting of a cityscape at dusk which was brought to life in Flame by adding twinkling lights and cars driving on the streets. The surrounding area of the Olympic park was also generated as a matte painting and 3D projections used for the camera move.

In the Basketball sequence, parts of the live action stadium were re-created in CGI to add LED displays, advertising banners and a huge jumbatron complete with scoreboards and countdown. Again all crowds created in CGI using Massive with pre comps in Nuke and final comps in Flame.

Being our first foray in to using Massive crowd software, the 3D team excitedly threw themselves into action generating over 200 textures in to create the variations in the crowds. For the different scenes some shirt colors were to be more prominent in line with the teams playing. After tracking and crowds were placed, CGI flags and camera flashes were generated. Hidden visual effects included combining multiple passes of car grades and elements extensive clean up and set extensions on various live action plates all done seamlessly by the 2D department.