LUCID AIR

A car process shoot for the Lucid Air, shot in a single day on the LED volume. We built three environments in Unreal Engine for the background animation: a New York style city street, open salt flats, and a curving tunnel connecting the two. The whole project was built in a few weeks over the holidays.

THE ENVIRONMENTS

The street, the salt flats and the tunnel that bridges them. The scene had to run smoothly for realtime work on the volume, so we focused on building tools that made laying out asset kits quick, efficient and controllable.

Previs in Unreal Engine

We worked from city sample assets and built spline tools to place and randomise street lights, city blocks from level instances, roads and props. We ran rounds of previs and review with the client team so they could plan, prelight and block their shots before their single day on the volume. The previs also showed how the content would look in camera, with shallow focus and long-exposure shutter blur.

Unreal Engine environment of a wet city street at night with warm lit windows and reflections on the road, built for the Lucid Air LED volume shoot.

Unreal Engine environment of a city intersection at night with lit building windows and a car's red tail lights glowing on the road.

Top-down previs view of a dark Lucid Air car on a light textured surface, used to block the car's position in the Unreal Engine scene.

Aerial Unreal Engine view of a car driving along a dark city street at night with lit building windows.

Unreal Engine tunnel environment lit by rows of warm glowing lights, the curving tunnel that connects the city street and the salt flats.

Aerial Unreal Engine view of a night city block layout with scattered street lights and building windows.

Aerial Unreal Engine view of a night city skyline with tall buildings and glowing lit windows.

Previs frame of a woman looking up at the city lights at night in the Unreal Engine street environment.

Previs frame of a woman standing on a city street at night in front of lit building windows in the Unreal Engine environment.

Behind the scenes

On shoot day we ran the volume remotely from the operator machine and drove the content in real time. We adjusted camera angles and made small tweaks to lighting and exposure so the client could keep up with a fast shooting schedule. It was the director’s first time shooting on a volume, and we guided them to the looks they wanted on a quick turnaround.