Dare Launches Latest UK Anti-Smoking Ad

The 30” spot from Dare, launching Public Health England’s new anti-smoking campaign, illustrates the journey of dangerous chemicals through the body when smoking. 

“'Create disgust’. That was the brief.” say Dom & Nic. “We decided to shoot the organs as scaled models in camera and complete the rest of the journey using CG smoke and blood.

 

MPC worked hard on the research and development of the blood itself and the huge compositing job to get it to match the in camera organs. There were times when we were all scratching our heads, but after weeks of very long days, MPC cracked it and the film has been a real success. It looks horrible, in a good way. We can’t thank all the MPC team from all departments enough for their hard work and commitment.”

VFX Detail...

“MPC were involved right from the beginning,” says MPC VFX Supervisor Bevis Jones. “We went through a very detailed three week pre-vis process in our CG department which continued up to, and during the shoot, to ensure that we knew exactly how the spot would work. The organs were shot in camera on a motion control rig. This was done at high-speed (fps) to give us flexibility in the edit/composite to smoothly ramp up and down in terms of speed.”

MPC created CG blood and smoke, which were then composited into the footage of the organs. The 2D team then worked on adding extra detail to bring the scene to life. They created 2D projections of diseased lungs that grew along the surface of the organs, they also added the effect of the blood in the heart blackening and animated the dark “gunk” moving slowly through the brain.

“A lot of consideration had to be given to how the shots should look. There is no light in a human body, so we had to find a lighting solution that made sure everything was impossibly visible but in a way that still felt disgustingly real.” Bevis continues.

“We only had two and a half weeks to complete the VFX, so we invited Dom & Nic to camp out in the corner of our project room to keep things flowing. They had to put a lot of trust in us, as we didn’t have a lot of time. It was a really collaborative effort, we love working with them and we are very pleased with the result.”

Credits

Agency: Dare
Agency Producer:  Bradley Woodus
Chief Creative Officer: Sean Thompson
Creatives: Andrew Edelston, Pippa Harrigan, Nick Bird, Lee Smith.

Production Company: Outsider
Director: Dom & Nic
Production Company Producer: John Madsen
DOP: Alex Barber

Editor: Zoe Izzard @ MPC

VFX: MPC
VFX Producer: Ian Luxford
CG Line Producer: Sandra Eklund
VFX Supervisor(s): Jim Radford and Bevis Jones
Grade: MPC
Colourist: Jean-Clement Soret