Element 4: Club Series
Client: Café Noir Videoproducties
Role: Visual Effects artist
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74Q_YWgQyGI
Café Noir produced a commercial for a gas fireplace from Element 4. The Club Series fireplace is a fireplace that gets mounted inside of a wall, allowing it to be seen from both sides of the wall. They wanted a shot where the camera goes through the fireplace, from once side of the wall to the other side of the wall, while the fireplace is lit and with the camera going through the glass. For this shot, though, the fireplace couldn’t actually be on and the glass would have to be removed in order to allow the camera to go through. So, the plan was to use VFX to add back in the glass and fire.
Originally, Café Noir hired another visual effects artist to create this effect. Unfortunately, they couldn’t pull of the effect. Café Noir then reached out to me, to see if I could create the effect instead. I agreed and I received the footage. Unfortunately, there was no lens distortion grid, camera settings list, or HDRI. Just the footage and some pictures of the set. They did place a few pieces of magenta tape to help with tracking. I started off by camera tracking the footage, but unfortunately the software that I used couldn’t track the footage.
I ended up having to manually match move the camera for about one and a half weeks. Once I had match moved the camera and recreated the shape of the fireplace, I could move on to creating the glass and fire. The glass was quite simple, since it was just a pane of glass, which I could model as a thin cube. I did had to punch a hole through it for the camera, so that you got the effect of the glass pane edge wiping across the screen. To achieve the reflections, I mapped the footage onto some geometry.
The fire was more difficult. I originally tried to simulate the flames, but they just didn’t match the flames in the other shots. I ended up asking for footage of the flames from the side on, which they had luckily shot for use in the commercial. I then keyed out the flames and did some processing to approximate data like density, thickness, and emission. But, the footage wasn’t long enough for the shot, so I did had to manipulate it further to make it looping. I then ran that data through a custom written application which turned it into three dimensional volumetric data. That could then be placed in the scene where the fire is.
Around the fire are some crystal-like things through which light comes from. But this also reflects the flames. For this, I simply modelled a rough approximation of the crystals, which I used to capture the reflections from the CG fire.
Combining everything together and compositing it onto the footage, produced a cool looking shot of the camera going through a lit fireplace, that at first looked like it wouldn’t be possible.
