Brizo
Jason Wu
Director Liam Chapple - Carbon
Agency Young & Laramore

Case Study

Carbon

  • Director Liam Chapple
  • Executive Creative Director Liam Chapple
  • Executive Producer Nick Haynes
  • Producer Beth Skopp
  • Colorist Aubrey Woodiwiss
  • Color Assistant Briana Bracket
  • Color Assistant Ale Amato
  • Lead Flame Artist Chris Wiseman
  • Nuke Artist Jen Howard
  • Nuke Artist Fred Kim
  • Lead FX Artist Ryan Hussain
  • FX Artist Adam Thompson
  • FX Artist Daniel Noren
  • Lead CGI Artist Frank Grecco

External

  • Client Brizo
  • Agency Young & Laramore
  • Executive Creative Director Trevor Williams
  • Account Director Gina Caratelli
  • Editorial Company Whitehouse Post
  • Editor Dan Zabinski
  • Sound Design Wave
  • Mix Chris Afzal
  • Music Company SixtyFour Music
  • Designer Dorian Gourg

Our latest, fully CG project for Young and Larrimore and Brizo comes to life in a series of shifting, abstract landscapes that were inspired by the work of great fashion designer Jason Wu– tropical flowers and the three states of water. Working closely with Whitehouse Post’s editor Dan Zabinski and Wave Studios’ sound designer Chris Afzal, we crafted a series of procedural growth systems using a Houdini/Nuke pipeline. This allowed us to propagate and bring into bloom large-scale, highly detailed floral arrangements, with full control over timing, position, type of flower, and speed of blooming.




When the lovely people at Y&L entrusted us to write, design, and direct the Jason Wu project we were thrilled. One of our favorite things is an open brief, as it gives us room to flex our creative and technical muscles at the same time. Blank page creative is really exciting, and Brizo gave us the perfect launch pad; their photographic campaign featuring the florals and product, in a luxe, tropical paradise, set within a reflective, black void. Hell. Yeah.




Our process began with a dive into writing concepts, exploring ideas and initial designs. We knew it had to look like a high-end fashion, luxury goods, or tech brand piece, so we really dialed up the macro textural elements and abstraction, deciding upon the three states of water as our core theme. It was during the style-frame process that we knew we were onto something very beautiful, and thankfully the freedom the client had entrusted us with paid off!



The team first modeled the flowers and eaves, then built a number of different branching and growth systems that allowed us to add the blossoming flowers to points that could be assigned throughout the spaces with incredible flexibility. Using the style-frames as our bedrock we built out the various scenes straight into animation for previs, then onto lighting and rendering and refining of FX.


The technical aspects threw up some challenges as we decided to utilize a Houdini/Arnold workflow, which was a first for us, as we’ve traditionally used a Maya/Vray approach. This decision was key to allowing us to really push the boat out when it came to scale, detail, dynamic simulation, cloth, and particle FX, without the need to pipe things over to Maya/Vray.




Once ‘in the can,’ we used Nuke’s amazing toolset to composite, using light selects to give more freedom to the 2D artists to play with the atmospheric look we were going for.




We are lucky enough to have the fantastic Aubrey Woodiwiss as director of color in-house, so the circle was completed when he sprinkled the film with his magic pixie dust and tied the package up with a bow.