We investigate the innovative visual effects work behind this footwear campaign

How Big Buoy and Smoke & Mirrors collaborated to create Rapha’s new Pro Team footwear campaign

Above: Work-in-progress images showing the complex CG visualisations of the shoes’ Powerweave fabric

British sportswear and lifestyle brand, Rapha, recently unveiled Comfort In The Chaos, a new campaign featuring innovative cycling shoes designed specifically for racing. Created in collaboration with fabric experts, carbon manufacturers and professional cyclists, the footwear utilises Powerweave, an entirely new, complex fabric devised of precisely engineered yarns and weave. The shoe has been engineered for comfort, power and performance, having been tested for over two years in all climates and conditions.

The 60-second campaign was directed by Oliver Duggan through London-based production company Knucklehead. CG fabric imitation and post-production came courtesy of a collaboration between Big Buoy and Smoke & Mirrors, two full-service post-production facilities. Head of editing at Big Chop (Big Buoy’s editing house),

Matthew Felstead, also lent his talents to the campaign. “Oliver got me involved at an early stage to help put a storyboard together from historical Rapha and cycle brand films, so we could understand the challenges of making the camera travel through different parts of the shoe and how each different section would look and feel,” he explains. “Oliver had a very specific vision for the film, so the challenge for me was ensuring that he was getting the energy and pace he had envisioned.”

Due to the nature of the campaign, there were a number of creative hurdles for the CG artists at Smoke & Mirrors to overcome. “Whenever you’re blending CG directly into live action with no cutaway point, it’s going to present a challenge,” VFX supervisor Kristaan Cain tells 3D World. “It’s crucial to have the level of detail and quality so there’s no chance of the viewers’ experience being broken by a mismatch. To achieve that, we scanned the real shoe first, to make sure

all the proportions were exact and then created an exact replication of the pattern. It’s not a straightforward design, so it was very challenging to create the pattern and to avoid moire, which is often seen with crossing lines.”

Ensuring that the CG replica of the shoe was photorealistic and precise was the biggest challenge posed by the project, says Smoke & Mirrors’ head of CG William Torres. “Like most modern footwear, it is composed of very intricate patterns and a variety of different materials,” he adds. “In this film, the camera framing would bring the viewer extremely close to the fine details, so no corners could be cut.”

Cain and his team were tasked with creating something that could work as an abstract piece as well as being instantly recognisable as the Rapha brand. “It’s relatively common for projects to get overly caught up in abstract and artistic outputs, whilst ignoring the narrative and key brand messages,” he adds. “With the uniqueness of the product in question, it would have been a shame not to have pushed the brand’s defining qualities. The pattern and colour of the shoe are very distinguishable, which is something we pushed throughout the whole spot. The key was to match the colours and demonstrate the strength of the actual fabric by way of showing the interwoven aspect of it.” The team focused on emphasising the texture and overall look of the abstract shots to guide viewers into believing that the organically weaving elements would form the shoe.

Each of the abstract, woven animations of thread were made by Cain and the team in Houdini. He explains: “We created a geometric version of the texture and then gradually animated it to build the shoe.” This was then exported to senior 3D artist and lighting expert Dimitar Kralev, who would render using V-ray. The textures themselves were created with a combination of Photoshop, Substance and Maya, before being lit in V-ray.

“We rarely get so much creative freedom as on this project,” adds Kralev. “All the abstract shots were the result of an iterative collaboration with director Oliver Duggan: we presented various tests and checked how they worked in context, developing them until the result felt complete. Deciding how long each abstract shot would last was guided by the early offline edits. We found that putting even very early tests into the offline gave us useful feedback on the length and pace of the shots.”

This close collaboration with Duggan proved key to the project; after establishing the important visual goals, the team were given the creative freedom to play up their strengths and push the overall quality of the piece. Torres adds: “Oliver had some very clear visual requirements and input and that clarity meant all the difference in the final execution of this creative project.”

“THE CAMERA FRAMING WOULD BRING THE VIEWER EXTREMELY CLOSE TO THE FINE DETAILS, SO NO CORNERS COULD BE CUT” William Torres, head of CG, Smoke & Mirrors