5G Stories.
VFX and rotoscoping for EE's 5G Stories social campaign, working with Wunderman Thompson UK. Screen replacements on live-action footage, plus transitions and end frames, cut for Facebook and Instagram.
Scope
Client
Style
Partner
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Challenge
(01)
Screen replacements on footage shot without a single tracking marker.
EE needed a run of social films showing 5G in everyday use, which meant putting supplied interface content onto the phones in shot. The problem was the footage: no tracking markers, no green screens on the handsets, just phones being held and moved in normal light. Screen replacement is straightforward when the shoot has been planned for it. Here it hadn't, so the tracking had to work from the phones as they appeared on screen, and the original screens came with reflections that had to be kept, or the phones would stop looking like objects in a room.
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Solution
(02)
Motion tracking in Mocha, compositing in After Effects.
Working as part of the team at Wunderman Thompson UK, I tracked the handsets in Mocha, working from the phones themselves rather than markers, then took the shots into After Effects for the compositing. The screen content was supplied, so the job was getting it to sit in the shot: matching the movement, then pulling the reflections off the original plates and comping them back over the new screens so the phones still read as glass catching the room around them. I also designed the transitions and end frames, bringing in typography and graphics that carry EE's design through to the call to action.
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Conclusion
(03)
Tracking, screen comps, and keeping the reflections.
The campaign ran as a series of social films across Facebook and Instagram, each with the phone content composited in after the fact. The tracking holds through the movement and the reflections stay, so the interfaces read as screens in a room rather than graphics laid over the top, which is what keeps the films in the register EE wanted: ordinary people, ordinary settings, the network doing its job in the background. The transitions and end frames tie the set together and land each film on the same brand note.
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