Director Adam Berg wanted the spot to be shot at night but he also needed it to have a very bright “long exposure” look, thus giving everybody a reason to wear sunglasses at night. In addition to that, Berg wanted to place the story in some undefined futuristic city with inspiration from gritty sci-fi stories like Blade Runner, Fifth Element and the works of Enki Bilal. Stopp’s 3D department designed and built matte paintings for the outside shots and assistants rotoscoped extensively.

Shooting took place in London during two very long nights. Our head of 3D, Stefan Andersson attended the shoot to guide the team and make sure they got the takes they required. It involved motion control and multiple passes. One normal exposure pass for the actors and one long exposure pass to get the bright city look. The exposure was approximately a second per frame meaning that a shot could take up to half an hour. This gave vastly different results in exposure depending on what time at night it was shot. Some of the takes shot early in the morning were unusable due to over exposure. The motion control also wasn’t very steady so the passes weren’t aligned at all and they differed in exposure. On top of that the long exposure shots missed frames here and there meaning that they were not only unstable, they were also jumping in time. Plus people and lights were moving in and out of picture in some of the long exposure shots and had to be removed as well.

Stefan Andersson explains what his team did in 3D, “We built a lot of buildings and added set extensions to most of the close up scenes that are exterior shots. To help us out we borrowed Boris Nawratil from Filmtecknarna F. Animation to draw concept sketches for us. He drew the basic design and from there we extrapolated what we needed and started to build those buildings and objects in 3D. Boris made tons of drawings so we had a lot to choose from, and it made it easier for Adam Berg to see what the design would be before we started building.” Andersson continues, “The goal was to make it look futuristic and at the same time a bit industrial. So we added a lot of pipes, tubes, cables, ventilation shafts and extended all the buildings that were close to camera. I also went out with my digital camera to take reference photos of concrete and steel constructions. Those photos together with some hand painted images were then the base for the textures that were used on the models. We also built a lot of futuristic skyscrapers that were used to fill up a city skyline. This was also to add to the futuristic feel that we are in a large city in the future.”

Peter Marin and Johan Boije led the compositing work. Boije explains what they did, “The first thing we had to do was to get all material to match up both in space, time and exposure. This involved stabilizing, warping, time warping (thank you Kronos), cleaning up, colour correcting and lots of lots of rotoscoping. This needed to be done to give our 3D department something to work with and be able to 3D track moving shots. As we got material from 3D, Peter and I started to extend and add new buildings to the outdoor scenes and we replaced the original dark skies with new hazardous orange smoggy looking ones. We used rotoshapes done by our assistants to add actors back again and worked with various light effects, flares and beams on top of it all to blend things together. It sounds easy but it wasn’t. It took a lot of time to match things up and get the right overexposed look. We had to work on the transition of our main character backing into the dark, coming out as a girl. The “hero and heroine” weren’t perfectly aligned when backing in and out of the room. It is important to have movement as close as possible to get a good morph. That meant both characters had to be removed and stabilized before doing the actual morph and making a clean plate. The morph was done in Shake and put over the clean plate and after that the original movement was added back to the stabilized morph”.