We were approached by House of Greenland to help them produce Nothing Tech’s 2022 keynote presentation.  The creative was extremely ambitious considering the timelines, and duration of the final film.

The presenter was shot in a green screen studio, leaving us to produce an entirely CG environment to bring the presentation to life, which included a ‘mock’ phone reveal set to music.

The first stage of our approach was to design a digital set, with the brief to keep away from more customary routes of clean white environments, with the client wanting something much more gritty, and less ‘techi’.

As shown here in our initial look development, we wanted to create a sense of atmosphere and light. Using huge monolithic screens put intention was to present the graphics with a real presence and visual resonance throughout the presentation.

This was another project where we switched to using ACES CG colour once we started and appreciated the scope of the creative, which turned out to be a hugely important decision. The depth and range of colour you get with ACES enabled us to work with the dark backgrounds whilst maintaining the detail, which also allowed the light effects to supply impact, which just would not be possible in lower bit depth renders.

The presentation itself was shot in a single day which added more importance in making sure we captured all the necessary aspects of the keynote. As the studio space was relatively small, we would be heavily relied upon to make the digital space look cavernous.

Using C4D’s camera tracker we would then extend the sets and add post and CG camera moves to the plates.

Once we started receiving the screen content we came up with a nifty LED effect using real 4K dot matrix overlay layers. This helps give a much more realistic feel to the final comps, especially as the creative required the final effect to not be too polished, or ‘tech-focused’.

Following ingest of the 15 minutes of plates we had approximately 20 days to track, key, comp and render all the shots. In total, we had over 65 shots to complete! One slight issue was just how large the ACES renders were when they are multi-layer EXR files, (300Mb plus!).  This tested our network to the limits, but luckily we had upgraded to a 10Gb network connection just before the project started, which enabled us to send and receive large files with no fear of our network causing bottlenecks.

Our two new RTX 3090 render workstations certainly came in handy once we started rendering the backplates. Each armed with 4 GPUs, they made light work of any task we threw at them.

After some very long nights and weekends, we got there, over 15 minutes of comping with full CG environments completed to one of our tightest schedules ever. 

We are massively proud of what we achieved and want to say a big thank you to the whole team at Orchard and House Of Greenland.

You can view the full-length keynote above.

Software: Cinema 4D, Redshift and After Effects.

CREATIVE AGENCY: House Of Greenland

CREATIVE DIRECTORS: Tim Noble, Ellis King

AGENCY PRODUCERS: Sagal Aden-Buxton, Tamas Mesmer

DIRECTOR: Cedric LeGrand

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Alex Bender

EDITOR: Cedric LeGrand

CG/VFX STUDIO: Orchard Post

EXEC PRODUCER: Kabir Malik

CG DIRECTOR/PRODUCER: Martin Cook

CG ARTISTS/COMPOSITORS: Luke Barker, Richard Peterson, Michael Woodruff, Ryan Nichols, Gavin Watton, Harry Fisher, Jules Diamandis and James Drummond

GRAPHICS: Dana Giurescu

SOUND DESIGN: Gurdeep Singh

MUSIC COMPOSITION: Kill Miami and Wavze.