Creating Grandeur: RASCAL’s VFX Mastery of On’s Zendaya-Powered Ad

Zendaya is the household name who you’ll usually spy on cinema screens for blockbusters like Dune and Challengers. This time however, she features front and centre of a 60 second spot for Swiss athleisure brand, On. Directed by C Prinz through SMUGGLER, it chronicles a squad of dancers choreographed by the director herself, whose hypnotic movements add to the climbing beat of an inspiring monologue voiced by the star. The message of the campaign entitled 'Dream Together' is one of togetherness through movement – inviting viewers to ‘try’, ‘fail’, and ‘get right back up’. 

RASCAL’s Chris Tobin is one of their newer recruits, joining earlier this year after spending 14 years in VFX supervision. This project for him stands out as the benchmark of excellent collaboration. After travelling to Los Angeles, spending time on set and working with the concept artist, Chris had a massive undertaking on his hands. The film is set in a staggering stadium, influenced by images of ancient coliseums – but here’s the kicker – almost none of it is real. The scale, impact, and overall believability of the arena and track is down to Chris’ impeccable eye and skill. 

LBB’s Tará McKerr spoke to Chris to find out how exactly RASCAL pulled it off. 

LBB> How did this collaboration come about? What was the initial brief?

Chris> The project came about from the great relationship between RASCAL and SMUGGLER. SMUGGLER decided to collaborate with RASCAL, our creative director, Markus Lundqvist and myself as VFX lead. We were very excited by the chance to work with them again, especially on something as artistic as the On campaign.

The initial brief was to design and build a CG stadium and track environment that could be art directed into a sequence of dancing shots. It didn’t want to be overpowering or distract from the subject; however it needed to portray the awe-inspiring scale of the space in which the dancers were based.

LBB> How does this particular project differ from ones you’ve worked on before? 

Chris> I think what set this apart from other projects was the immediate collaboration between all parties involved. From the minute we took a look at the treatment, conversations began between RASCAL, SMUGGLER and director, C Prinz about how the film could look and feel with all elements working in tandem – choreo, cinematography, VFX and music.

Another unique factor was how beautifully the cinematography showcased the hypnotic choreography. I was excited to add my craft to this job after seeing the rushes from the shoot.

LBB> You went out to LA and spent some time on set, being able to have an input with the creative side of things. In what ways did this impact the overall project experience and the final outcome?

Chris> Being on set is always extremely beneficial from a VFX perspective, and this job was no different. I think from a technical point of view it was great to be there to answer any questions that arose from C (director) and Ollie (DOP) especially when it came down to any shots that were going to be composited together. From a creative perspective, and as we were already building VFX elements in tandem with the shoot, having us on set allowed us to deeply understand the director’s vision and fine tune our ideas as we went.

LBB> Could you share insights into how you went about building the stadium environment from scratch? What tools or techniques did you use? Were there any specific challenges in creating such a large-scale digital environment?

Chris> The stadium look was driven heavily by concept art that we created alongside C Prinz. Once the style frames were signed off we went ahead with modelling it from scratch. Sand and seating textures, floor and track were all decided. A small section of the stalls were built practically for Zendaya to sit on throughout any close up shots. This gave us a perfect reference to model the rest of the seating, allowing the set extension to be seamless. Once textured, lighting was key to bring the whole set to life. C Prinz's vision was clear and detailed, we didn’t want to illuminate the whole stadium but rather subtly light up edges and small sections keeping the subtle feel of the set. A major challenge was during the CG lighting stage: we wanted the track to fall off into darkness but still allow the stadium to be seen within that. We couldn’t just illuminate the whole frame as this would be too distracting. It still needed to convey a feeling of mystery and scale.

LBB> Can you elaborate on how the creative process unfolded between the VFX team, concept artist and the director? What was the collaboration like? 

Chris> Collaboration between all of these teams was incredibly in sync. This was one of those jobs where I would say it ran like clockwork. The creative process had a great level of flow to it meaning that from concept art through to delivery, we never went off brief. C had a clear vision of what she was after but was always open to ideas, and the clients were great with the trust they put in her, SMUGGLER, and RASCAL to create the best version of what this campaign could be. 

LBB> What challenges did you face and how were they overcome? 

Chris> Technically, the main challenge was in the pre-shoot stage. Calculating the size of the set and ensuring there was enough distance from the track to the edge of the set was incredibly important, so there was a natural level of fall off into darkness therefore not casting any shadows on any dancers at the edge of track. Once this was set we then could lay the track out in the correct location to make this work. 

LBB> Stadium aside, what other pieces of work from this spot were you responsible for?

Chris> Of course the stadium was the largest part of the VFX for this project, however there were still multiple crowd duplication shots to be completed. These involved rooting and replicating the 40 dancers to build one large dancing ring that was then composited together of a clean background. The colour grade was also the work of RASCAL’s head of colour, James Bamford!

LBB> Something about this our readers would be surprised to learn? 

Chris> Zendaya was CGI…? 

Probably what elements were shot in camera to what weren’t. I’d like to think the set extension work (particularly at the start of the film) is seamless, so hopefully hard to work out what shots aren’t in camera. 

LBB> Anything else you’d like to add?

Chris> Personally I would just like to round off by saying this was a beautiful project to have been involved in. The perfect combination of VFX techniques and artistic cinematography. Using VFX to accentuate a story and push frames to be more epic. Thanks!