Boll & Branch — Take Over
“Let Extraordinary Take Over” was the brief for this project. We wanted to create a story of a dream that spoke to softness and evolved in a surreal moment where a room was being taken over by flowers. To bring it to life, we combined live action with CG.
Client: Boll & Branch. Studio: Steelworks. Role: Creative Director.
Directors Cut
There was so much that went into the early stages of this project, so much we explored and played with that it felt like a shame for many of those experiments to never see the light of day.
With that in mind, we created a small Director’s Cut, which you can see above.
Concept
The animated floral takeover was developed as a visual metaphor for comfort, renewal, and the natural origins of the product. We choreographed the floral blooms to gently emerge and flow through the room wrapping around furniture, drifting through light and interacting subtly with the environment.
Room Development
Before we got on set, we developed the look and feel of the room, so when it came time to build it for real, we had a clear idea of how it should look. That made the process much smoother for both the client and us when it came to building and lighting it for the live action.
AI Development
Using ComfyUI, I fed our own renders and live-action plates from the shoot into the AI, training the model to guide the comp and the integration of the flowers into the live-action plates. It was an interesting way to bring AI to the workflow.
Cotton Exploration
We wanted to convey a sense of softness, so we dove into the world of cotton, the main material the sheets are made of. As part of our R&D, we experimented with several different setups to explore how we could bring those ideas to life and visually represent softness.
Flower Creation
There was a lot that went into creating the flowers.
We 3D-scanned real flowers and then rebuilt them in Houdini to achieve a high level of detail for the animation. We also explored various playful setups, experimenting with different growth systems to bring the flowers to life in dynamic ways.
Technical
To make the flowers interact naturally with the scene,
we 3D-scanned the entire room from the live-action set. Using that data, we were able to accurately populate the space with the flowers we had filmed and digitally recreated. It was a really fun process to bring it all together. Challenging, but incredibly rewarding to mix different mediums.
Film
Shooting this was a lot of fun.
We storyboarded and pre-visualized all the shots in CG, which gave us a crystal clear vision going into the shoot. By the time we got on set, we knew exactly what we wanted and how to capture it, making every moment count. Here’s a bit of the behind the scenes of those days and an overall view of the project.
*I took the photos with a Hasselblad XPan and Hasselblad 500c, both film cameras.
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Client: Boll & Branch
Studio: Steelworks
Creative Director: Miguel Rato
Art Director: Liam Pitchford
Lead Designer: Sylvain Gaussens
Global Head of Production: Hannah Byers-Brown
Executive Producer: Chago Venable
Producer: Antia Goicoechea
Design: Julio Dean, Nil Estany, Sylvain Gaussens, Liam Pitchford, Afonso Soares, Martina Stifinger, Thiago Tallmann
Live Action: Rebecca Joelson, Kevin Joelson (The Joelson’s)
Comp/VFX: Coffe & TV, Gamma VFX Studio
Editor: Claudio Vasquez
Sound Design: Zelig Sound