This is a video breakdown that Accomplice put together to illustrate how the VFX/Compositing were achieved in our Virgin Mobile USA product demo ‘Unlimited Payback’. I Produced, Wrote, Co-Directed and Sound Designed the video. Accomplice did the Editing and Compositing, DGA Productions did the Shooting, and BEAM did the rest (Including creating all the screens on the phone in-house). It was a great collaboration from start to finish and I’m really proud of how it turned out.
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To go a little further on creating the in phone screens: In order to make this video at the resolution we wanted, without having to re-create and animate every single phone screen, we had to mimic the OS of the Optimus on a higher rez HTC Incredible. In order to do that we had to hack the both phones. There was no one at BEAM who had any experience doing that so it fell to me with the invaluable assistance of Graeme Reed to figure it out and make it happen. In addition we needed to get an app that could record screencasts from the phone at the new higher resolution and one that would diable the screen so we could touch it while the blue screen vids played back during our greenscreen shooting. There were apps that did part of what we needed but not all so we contacted the app developers and paid them a small amount to mod the apps to do exactly what we want. All in all it was incredibly difficult, delicate and complicated feat to pull off and I probably took more on my shoulders than I should have but we figured out a timely solution for every problem and turned out a really cool video.
Here’s another video demonstrating some of the elements we used to create the source footage to be composited.
