I worked on two shots for this Guinness commercial at Smoke & Mirrors in London, helping Sean Broughton who led the project. The first shot showed rocks tumbling into Guinness foam, then pulled back to reveal a pint, then pulled back more to show a poster girl holding it, and finally pulled back even more to show she was painted on a plane flying away. The second shot mixed real plane footage with a made-up desert landscape.
For the first sequence, I spent a lot of time getting the particle effects right - making rocks transform into that creamy Guinness foam. It was tricky work. The camera pulls were challenging too - each reveal had to feel just right. I worked with Sean to nail the timing so everything flowed naturally from small details to the big picture.
The compositing wasn't easy. We had to carefully blend the poster girl and make sure the 2D poster elements looked right on the 3D plane. We worked in Flame, and even made some custom tools to handle the tricky perspective changes.
For the second shot, I built a desert environment by combining photo elements with digital painting to get that distinctive Guinness look. Getting the real plane footage to sit naturally in this environment took careful color work and adding atmospheric effects so it didn't just look pasted in.