The film brings to life Chemical Brothers’ track ‘Wide Open’ by using a number of highly technical visual effects techniques, which are perfectly paired with the organic flow and movement of professional dancer Sonoya Mizuno who you see gradually turn into a fully 3D printed structure as she dances around the studio. The film produces a captivating story that perfectly entwines with the iconic Chemical Brothers sound, featuring Beck.
The creative brief behind this project was inspired by procedural cellular structures, with an aim to mix the mechanical and organic. The animation team worked to achieve the final effect by tracking the dancer’s movements in order to replace her limbs and eventually her whole torso with a lattice of 3D mesh. Clean plates were created for seven thousand frames entailing a huge amount of traditional hand painted comp work. To aid the process, the VFX team created a bespoke tool specifically for this project, which automatically scanned the final footage for clean parts of the set, projecting them onto the areas that the dancer occupied. This created a solution for the tracking of one continuous shot. Photogrammetry scanning was used to create a fully CG model of the dancer’s body including photo real textures. CG clothing was also built in Marvellous Designer and then rendered in Arnold.