Hellstar Adidas x Dick's Sporting Goods Nicekicks Commercial

I worked with a stellar team assembled by Nicekicks to remotely VFX supervise the planning as well as the production team, and optimize the IRL shoot for post production. The team captured images and 3D scans of the set and elements for me to work with in post production.

I then received the raw footage of that particular shot, both for black and white colorways. The camera was not on a perfect rail, so both shots were slightly different, which created an additional layer of challenge. I cut the shots to the best usable length of footage, then tracked them in Blender, aligned the 3D scan to the shot, modeled additional clean geometry for certain areas. I then did material work to both the meshes and to prepare for fire simulation in EmberGen. This included hand marking where fire needed to appear in the scene.

I then honed the fire simulation, which was challenging because I needed the end result to have a fine level of detail, but because of the relationship between the resolution of the simulation and the simulation speed it was difficult to nail down the right direction that looked realistic and also suited the art direction.

After finishing the simulation, I round tripped back to Blender, and then honed the materials further and set up render passes for compositing in Fusion. During this work there were several rounds of previs and review with the creative director.

When a final Blender render was finally done, I started compositing in Davinci Fusion, which once set up correctly allows for seamless adjustments and further tweaks in a responsive pipeline. I leveraged the render passes to finetune the look and incorporate feedback. I then applied effects overtop the entire shot to help create a cohesive look. I did all of this while looking through a Rec709 LUT to maintain a baseline appearance that could set the colorist up for success with the raw ungraded shot rendered out.

The final VFX shot was then handed off to the colorist and editor for the final cut.