Info about Open Your World Color Code

This spot for EF was ILP’s first commercial stereo production. It was a full on production involving CG to be integrated together with live action plates and greenscreen elements. It was a completely different challenge than the normal “mono production” and we’re very happy to have completed this together with our friends at Wreck.

See the campaign live here

To succeed with this production a lot more resources and focus was spent on pre-production and pre-viz. Because of the nature of a stereo production extra care was taken to make sure that the shots were locked down prior to the shoot in regards of camera angles, lenses, focus, timing, flow between shots, eye scanning etc. This was vital because once you’ve had the shoot there are some variables regarding the plates that you can’t change in post.

We decided, after a lot of research, to shoot with a parallel camera setup using RED Ones at 4K but framing for a centre crop 3K area. This overscan decision proved to be a very good approach for giving us maximal flexibility about post framing but also a big saver in regards to being able to tweak the convergence correctly.

As usual we took a lot of reference photos during the shoot, as well as measurements of the sets. We also shot lens grids and HDRI-probes to be able to integrate the CG as good as possible. All this information quickly proved to be very valuable when matching up the cameras in 3D to the real ones that shot the background plates.

The production workflow for the 3D artists was pretty similar to a normal non-stereo production in regards to animation, look development, lighting and rendering, with the obvious exception of more render time because of producing twice the material. On the compositing side there was quite a lot of extra work needed. All the material had to be time synced between the left and the right eye, processed to more exactly match in color and vertical alignment had to be tweaked. The less errors, or so called stereo disparities, the better the stereo/3D experience gets.

The final stage was to combine both eye’s material into a watchable stereo format. Nowadays there are a few different options for this. For this particular spot for EF, the choice landed on using a modern version of anaglyph called ColorCode which gives far better color perception than the traditional old-school red-green anaglyph.

Apart from all the fun we had we also learned a lot from this production. To say the least, we are very happy and proud of the outcome!

If you’d like to get ColorCode glasses you can buy them from this website