senckađ
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Group745
Behind the Work in association withThe Immortal Awards
Group745

How No.8 Helped Turn Ed Sheeran’s ‘2step’ Promo into a Cinematic and Mind-Bending Experience

12/09/2022
Post Production
London, UK
329
Share
Jim Allen, No.8’s creative director and partner, and Alex Gregory, head of colour, detail the challenges and successes of making the video, and why working together helped get this complex project just right

Choreographed to perfection and bathed in a deep green night light, Ed Sheeran’s video for ‘2step’ was a complex one to set up and execute. Directed by Henry Scholfied, it took a lot of planning and pre-production before the team arrived to film on location, like making a detailed paper plan for each of the song’s different musical components. 

A lot of the aesthetic magic happened in post production, with Jim Allen, No.8’s creative director and partner, taking care of the copious amounts of VFX that went into the video, while Alex Gregory, No.8’s head of colour, worked to give the video a moody, cinematic feel. 


One of the biggest challenges for VFX on the production was getting Lil’ Baby into the video, who was included as a featured artist quite late into the process. While not an unusual request (the team shot clean plates in the middle section where a featured artist could appear), it still extended the timeline for completion and involved a complex organisational and post production job to bring all the elements together. Jim highlights that there was a huge volume of roto and cleanup work, including the removal of a moco rig from multiple shots. Still, working with VFX and colour under one roof meant that some elements of post could be simplified, like setting the look from a colour perspective early in the process to give the VFX team a good idea of the final visual. 

Today, Jim and Alex dive into the details of how the ‘2step’ video came together in the post production process, their creative relationship with director, Henry Scholfield, and how they overcame the challenges that the video presented. 


LBB> How did the VFX for this spot accentuate the vision for the video? What was the original brief? 

Jim> The original brief was to assist Henry in creating a mind-bending, multi-dimensional choreographed film featuring repeated characters timed precisely to musical cues. A typically adventurous and exciting brief from Henry Scholfield.

Alex> Henry’s original brief was to keep everything quite dark and cinematic. We wanted Ed to look his best in every environment, but also create a sense of atmosphere across the cityscapes. At the same time though, this is a music video, we weren’t going for a sense of realism, we wanted to create a look that was gritty and striking and helped bed in the huge amounts of CG and VFX.


LBB> The background dancers are one of the most memorable aspects of this music video. How did the VFX and CGI teams work together to bring the surreal movements of the choreography to life? 

Jim> Henry had an extremely detailed paper plan where he had broken the music track down into separate components. Each of these components would act as a musical cue for the appearance or disappearance of a character on screen. From this plan a rudimentary animatic was created and then a pre-viz.

It was clear from early on that motion control would be essential in many of the scenes to be able to repeat characters and keep the camera moving.

The pre-viz was built using real world measurements of the location and used actual moco rigs in the software. In this way we were able to quickly iterate camera moves and lenses all the way up to the shoot day until we had a full pre-viz for the whole film. 

From this point the shoot should have been plain sailing but unfortunately one of the moco rigs got stuck at the border and we had to hastily redesign some of the camera moves to work with a new rig while on set and already filming!


LBB> The video is set during a chilly night - how was colour used to enhance and balance what can be seen in the final video?

Alex> A lot of the video is lit with the sodium street lights, or lights in bus shelters, passing traffic, office windows etc. and we found quite early on that the key was to find a look that accentuated the different colours and qualities of all of these light sources. We pushed everything darker and darker until we found a place that meant they all really stood out and focus was drawn to Ed and the huge cast of people in the street. Overall we tipped a lot of the cityscape towards a dense green, but making sure skin tones stayed warm and consistent throughout.


LBB> Towards the end of the video there are some awe-inspiring freeze-frames of towering skyscrapers and interweaving highways that form a kaleidoscope of dizzying shots…was this as complicated to orchestrate as it looks? How did you use VFX to create these shots? 

Jim> The end section of the film became increasingly complex as the project progressed. We worked with the extremely talented people at Method and Madness to realise this section and they were continually pushing to get more and more detail into the scene. If you step through slowly you can see an incredible amount of detail with CGI people, cars, buses, a whole virtual bustling city. It would be nice to do a slow fly through of this section just to appreciate the level of detail achieved but I think the render farm may be having a well earned rest!


LBB> How closely did you work with the director, Henry Scholfield, in post? How did the director accommodate the grading to ensure you could do the best possible work? 

Jim> Henry is always very collaborative when it comes to post. He has a great technical understanding of the process which means he is able to suggest ideas from not only a creative viewpoint but also offer practical problem solving approaches. For the VFX team this is incredibly helpful.

At No.8 we usually always work ungraded in Linear colour space and grade at the end of the process. This gives both the VFX and the colour team the greatest possible latitude when working. In this case, Alex Gregory set a look early in the VFX process so the VFX team had an idea of how the final film would look before applying and finishing the grade at the end.

Alex> Henry and I worked closely together throughout the process. Our intention was to create a look for the video that felt cinematic and bold, but at the same time helped all the CG and VFX elements to really bed-in. He’s a very visual director with a strong sense of aesthetic and a clear vision of where the grade needs to sit. But equally he is always keen to experiment. We bounced a few ideas back and forth, while sitting in the suite together and later, sending stills and ideas to each other via whatsapp. This resulted in something we were both very happy with.


LBB> How long did the VFX and grade take to be fully realised? And what was the hardest challenge you faced along the way? 

Jim> We first started discussing the video in November 2021 and finally finished in April 2022. The original timeline got extended due to the late inclusion of Lil’ Baby as a featured artist.

It is sometimes the case with promos that a featured artist gets added to the track during the process and we knew this was a possibility when shooting the Ed Sheeran plates. With this in mind we shot clean plates of the middle section where Lil’ Baby might appear.

Once it was confirmed Lil’ Baby would feature, the production team flew to LA and used the original moco move to shoot Lil’ Baby and his dance crew in a studio space. A challenge we came up against was the original location was on a slope which we couldn’t recreate in the studio setting. The moco move had to be adapted to take account of this slope so the two elements would then fit together.

Probably the biggest challenge we faced was the sheer volume of roto and cleanup work required. Each section of the video has on average 80 separate plates which all required roto. The moco rig used took up quite a lot of the screen and had to be carefully removed which in many cases necessitated the reconstruction of environments in 3D space. This work wasn’t the glamourous part of the project but it took a herculean effort by a great number of artists to get it done.

Alex> The original look was set near the beginning of the project. Henry and I spent a few hours discussing his intentions and where he wanted to go with it. He’d prepared some references for me, so I played around, trying to find a middle ground between the references and where the material naturally sat. By the end of the session we’d built a look that we were happy with, and then it was a case of waiting for the VFX and CG to be ready. We next looked at the grade a couple of months later, once all the VFX elements were in place. We finessed the look around all the work that had been done, with an eye for making sure all the added CG elements felt embedded in the scene so the video, as a whole, felt cohesive and completely immersive.



LBB> What’s your highlight of working on this project? 

Jim> The highlight of the project for me was seeing the incredible amount of adaptability and problem solving by everyone involved in the project. The Ukrainian team did an incredible job in getting everything shot in the time available and the resulting film is something we can all be proud of.

Credits
More News from No.8ldn
Work of the Week
Work of the Week: 29/03/24
29/03/2024
33
0
Music & Sound
Radio LBB: Bank Holiday Bangers
26/03/2024
108
0
ALL THEIR NEWS
Work from No.8ldn
Breathe
Yeat
28/03/2024
7
0
First Office Poo
Andrex
26/03/2024
13
0
Post Poo Euphoria
Andrex
26/03/2024
17
0
ALL THEIR WORK