The Hettema Group approached us to create a 3-minute music video to entertain visitors to the High Roller Wheel that was then under construction at the new Linq shopping and entertainment plaza in Las Vegas. In the center of the queue room are six state-of-the-art projectors, set up to project a 270° image around the walls. The end result is spectacular – a feeling of immersion into the imaginary 3D world we created.
The full resolution of this piece is nearly 10k by 2k – it required a customized production pipeline in which five viewports in Cinema4D with matching HD comps in After Effects were stitched together with multiple vanishing points to create one panoramic seamless window into the Neon City.
Lessons learned
I discovered about halfway through that it was going to be impossible to composite pre-rendered passes in a traditional pipeline, due to client changes and revisions, so I created my own hybrid Cinema 4D/After Effects pipeline using Video Copilot’s Element 3D to capitalize on almost real-time GPU renders within After Effects while still taking advantage of shadows and reflections while animating within Cinema 4D. This was quite a challenging project to accomplish as a solo artist on a single 2008 Mac Pro!
The anthemic music is by R/D and I had some modeling help for some of the buildings from Justin Coury, as well as some boards design help from Anthony Hurd early on in the process, but other than that it was a completely solo effort.
