Mill creates seamless VFX for third '3' Spot

The Mill London's latest vfx adventure for Hutchinson '3' went on air on June 1 - this is the third spot for the campaign and the third outing for director Fredrik Bond.
The commercial centres around the journey of a young girl to fulfil her life long dream of playing basketball. In typical '3' style her journey is bizarre. She comes from a wonderful weird town somewhere in the oriental alps where everyone has very large hands. Following her journey to the buzzing metropolis where she enters the spectacular stadium and eventually gets involved in a game of basketball on the court, she is stopped in her tracks but not before she has completed her dream of playing basketball on the worlds biggest stage.
The 60-second commercial was shot on location in LA, supervised by The Mill's Jordi Bares with the Mill London creating seamless vfx from CG environments to digital matte paintings, head replacements and crowd replication. The Alpine backdrop to the opening scene was a digitally enhanced matte painting generated in Softimage XSI with the people, huts and a large building also assisted by CG and flame duplication. The journey between the countryside and city was shot against green screen and a cg city background was built and the girl's arrival in the city created in an extensive night photogrametry shoot.
A shot involving major work is when the girl arrives at the stadium. The original stadium was a dull grey concrete façade so The Mill team worked closely with director Fredrik Bond to design a new façade for the building and then to build a new building in 3D. The challenge was then to seamlessly bed this into the live action plate, which involved compositing the building, adding interactive lights to the foreground and compositing the people over the top. Bond also wanted the scene to feel busier and to this end The Mill added three trains to the background.
Inside the stadium most shots required crowd replication that was all achieved by manipulating 2d plates. Also all the moving screens have the '3' logo animating in them and these were generated in cg and composited in flame.
The final shot of the girl being dragged away required Flame artist Neil Davies to comp another shot of the hand into the desired take - again ensuring that agency and director got what they wanted from the story.
(GB)