Romeo Reboot directed by Rafael Grampá is one of four 10-minute short films produced by Axe/Lynx. Corona Renderer was used to achieve realism and integrate the giant and knives into the live action footage.

The project consists of a hundred thousand unique trailers generated by an algorithm, each trailer assembled from tagged clips taken from all four of the 10-minute shorts. These so-called “generative trailers” come from Axe’s digital agency in Brazil, Interpublic’s CUBOCC, Sao Paulo. The campaign breaks the Axe target consumers into four segments, offering 25,000 permutations to each segment, or 100,000 in all!

We had the huge challenge of creating a realistic looking rock giant cyclops walking through Paulista Avenue in Brazil. The giant goliath was supposed to rise above the buildings and walk his way to the sunset.

To achieve this we decided to use Corona Renderer, with HDR specially created during the shootings. I supervised the shooting, and one of the most important things was that the real lighting of the day was not perfect, so we had to relight everything in post. The HDR I have captured in the shooting was a great starting point, but we had to recreate the sunlight. Corona Sun is amazing and gives very realistic light interaction upfront, and  Corona’s exposure setting puts everything under control right in the frame buffer… this was a very fast workflow and the decision-making process was very straightforward.

One of the things I like most about working with Corona is how fast the Look Dev process goes. It is very fast to achieve the objective, and to experiment with new approaches.

Right at the time I was working on the displacement parameters, a new release came out with lots of displacement-related improvements, making my life a whole lot easier. Displacement was always something very expensive in render time, but Corona delivers very high quality with relatively low render times.

For this project, Corona seemed to be the best fit for the studio pipeline.

You can see additional videos and making-of images under the following link:
http://www.animation.art.br/Romeo-Reboot

-André Holzmeister