The Collector - Mo’s Best Bud
The second installment of Sky’s Collector campaign features Mo, another “collector” who sets off on his dirt bike to capture his Sky content including a Formula 1 car and a dinosaur from Jurassic World. Framestore once again conjures the signature Sky portal, helping on his quest.
For the Jurassic World sequence, the team was tasked with turning the live action location of Missenden Valley in Buckinghamshire into Gyrosphere Valley. The team did this with a number of digital matte paintings, using references from the film and photography of real-life locations like those found in Hawaii as a basis for Isla Nublar before compositing the island’s resident Dinosaurs into the final frames.
Talking about this sequence, Chris Redding said ‘The main thrust of our work was transforming a pristine English countryside into something much more rugged and exotic. We actually ended up replacing more and more in the live action plates than we’d planned and adding in more CG.
The team had more VFX-driven heavy-lifting to do for Mo’s Best Bud than in Harris and the Robots, not least as they replaced live action reference vehicles with digital Formula 1 cars that are seen racing around Silverstone. With the shoot taking place on a non-race day at Silverstone, CG crowds were added to the stands, along with mingling bystanders beside the track, and the plethora of other trackside vehicles, tents and structures that are an essential part of the texture of an F1 weekend.
‘We needed to make the F1 sequence quite intimate,’ commented Beau Garcia. ‘Everything we added had to place the viewer right in amongst the action and communicate the visceral nature of those shots which was a very fun challenge.’
Then throughout all the other vignettes that make up the film, it was Framestore’s job to not only to place the portal in the scenes, but also sell its power to the audience. The team did this with a number of CG assets that had to be created and added to the scenes as they’re whipped into the portal throughout. These Included a flurry of 50 Euro notes and one of the iconic Dali masks featured in the show in the Netflix/Money Heist sequence and CG facsimiles of the winning paintings from Portrait Artist of the Year.