Once the wire characters were moving in 3D via motion capture, Glaser was able to shoot a variety of action coverage as if he had a virtual camera crew and dancers on stage. "It was important to me that the characters were shot using techniques that would be used if I were shooting real dancers," Glaser noted. "I didn’t want live action plate shots of a life size camera trying to capture angles looking into the dancers’ miniature world. To help immerse the audience in that world, I wanted the camera to dance with the characters and move at their scale as if we had a 6-inch tall film crew."

To allow complete freedom in shooting the dance sequence, SWAY additionally recreated the entire interior location, including the champagne bottles, table candles and twinkling city lights, utilizing their renowned photo real CG, HDRI, compositing and photogrammetry techniques. The end result is a spot that is almost entirely computer generated as only seven of the 24 shots contain live action.

SWAY used a variety of off-the-shelf hardware and software to complete the Chandon spot. The most prominently used tools were NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics boards, Nuke for compositing, Scratch for color grading, V-Ray for lighting and rendering and After Effects for logo treatment. 3ds Max 9 was used as the primary animation tool while Lumonix Puppetshop was also used for final character rigging and animation.

More Information at: www.swaystudio.com. - Image and Video Courtesy of SWAY.