ShortCut LED Stage uses Disguise for Kayak commercial

In a hyper-connected society where a multitude of second-hand experiences often shape our understanding of the world, first-hand experiences put life into perspective.  A new commercial for travel search engine Kayak, which was shot with the Disguise virtual production workflow encourages viewers to travel and see life for themselves.

Summary

Kayak’s ‘Think This' online ad campaign from Danish agency &Co. / NoA and production company Honeytrap, was shot on the Nordisk Film ShortCut LED stage in Copenhagen. The spot’s concept required photorealistic as well as abstract and immersive locations to be shot in a single day with a limited timeframe reserved for post-production.  

The ShortCut LED stage, the world's first full 360° LED stage, helped ensure photorealistic lighting and an immersive feel. Additionally, the stage’s Virtual Art Department assisted in the creative deliveries for a true one-stop solution for the shoot, all together making it a project that would have been impossible with traditional filming techniques and without ICVFX.

The challenge

The project required the ShortCut LED stage to deliver photorealistic content and lighting, motion graphics mapped to specific screen areas, motion capture, Unreal Engine content with camera tracking, content-mapped dolly screens, a 4K plate extension and 12K video plate collection with ShortCut’s own 360° film camera. Also, as the camera panned to the ceiling and rotated full circle, the content perspective needed to be corrected for seamless in-camera footage.

The solution

The ShortCut LED stage chose the Disguise VP workflow to facilitate the complex project, deploying four Disguise VX 2 media servers (with an additional unit on hand for backup), four RX II render nodes running RenderStream and a Fabric network switch.

Virtual Production Supervisor, Mads Buus, believes that the amount of content and the technical diversity of the spot would have been hard to manage without the Disguise workflow. It serves as a “hub” where the stage can gather, set up and organise everything needed for a given project and make it easy to play back content.

Results

Kayak’s commercial has been a YouTube hit from its first month of release, very successfully delivering its message of the joy of first-hand travel experiences with the help of virtual production.