This is a 30 second trail for Radio 1xtra, featuring the DJ Charlie Sloth - who also provided the cheeky VO!

It made use of quite a lot of the new features in Lightwave 11.5 - particularly the After Effects link and also Bullet Forces (as well as standard hard body stuff). LW11.5 is a *really* great upgrade, I honestly couldn't have done this (in the time we had - just 2 weeks!) without it.

After Effects integration allowed some really neat timesaving features. I used Trapcode Soundkeys to isolate the bass drum sounds, then used it to drive the movement of a 3D null. This was then exported to LW, where I used it to drive a Bullet Force, which made the glass and the phone shake. I then sent the cameras and lights back to After Effects and added some nice VC Optical Flares to the rendered footage - and it all sync'ed up perfectly!

Render-wise this was all done using Monte Carlo GI and heavy use of depth of field (using the real lense camera). To reduce the noise to acceptable levels, I used 128 passes of adaptive sampling. Amazingly, despite the GI and DOF - It only took about 1-2 minutes to render each frame (at 1280*720).

Oh - and I used the conductor and dialectric nodes on the metal and glass. Ridiculously easy to set up - and looks great!

The rendered frames were sent back to After Effects, and the AE link was used to send LW cameras and lights in AE. These were then used to add extra flares and optical effects. It was then edited together using FCPX and final grading was done in After Effects using Magic Bullet tools (Colorista and Looks).

BBC Radio 1xtra -
"BassPhone"
Dir. Robert Samuels,
March 2013

Production company:Red Bee Media

3D CG, editing, compositing and finishing by Dan Sollis

DOP: Serge Teulon

Sound designer: Alex Bingham