LA-based VFX house Ingenuity Studios contributed 65 VFX shots in five unique CG environments for Spotify’s star-studded, technically complex “Today’s Top Hits” campaign, which highlights the streaming service’s largest playlist of the same name. The campaign features Dua Lipa, Bad Bunny, Blackpink, Travis Scott and Billie Eilish.
In this new campaign, viewers fly through fantastical worlds, where their favorite artists find inspiration to create music. Just after viewers are seated in an antigravity chamber, they experience a wild transition. The chair flies out of the chamber and across the moon before zooming in on the final environment, which features a magical tree perched atop the moon. One environment is situated within another environment. The studio delivered 90-second, 60-second and 15-second edits for each artist.
Ingenuity Studios built all of these environments in CG, with live-action, on-set footage shot completely on greenscreen or bluescreen using an ARRI Alexa LF camera. The studio helped to provide a sense of framing for the on-set virtual environments during previz to prepare for effects work.
“Ingenuity came on board early in the project’s development, providing concept art and previz to help realize key set pieces and refine the edit,” says Ingenuity Studios owner and VFX supervisor Grant Miller. “We worked closely with director Warren Fu, whose background in visual development yielded great feedback and really helped elevate the work.”
On set, Ingenuity Studios deployed a virtual production workflow it had already used on a variety of projects, allowing the previz environments to be viewed live in the monitors. Not only did the process help line up shots and lay out camera moves, but it kept the whole team aligned on what they’d be seeing in the background once the production went to post.
Transitioning from environment to environment was a technical challenge, and placing one environment inside the other added a whole other level of complexity.
“The team wanted to drive home that all of these environments were inside the same ship, so it was a challenge to ensure that transitions feel seamless. These are really big worlds,” Miller says. “For example, the largest scene that Ingenuity handled was made possible by Solaris inside Houdini, a new USD system, and by rendering with RenderMan. In the past, this scene would have been split up into different parts and reassembled, but working with USD, we’re able to hold the entire scene in one file, rendering everything together for better lighting and interaction.”
Besides SideFX Houdini and Pixar RenderMan, Ingenuity Studios also called upon Foundry Nuke, Autodesk Maya, Adobe’s After Effects and Premiere, and 3DEqualizer.
“Having done a number of videos and other projects with both Billie and Travis in the past, this commercial felt like a natural progression of those relationships,” adds Miller. “All of the artists involved gave great feedback and were keen to help craft environments that were representative of their varied identities.”
