Lola Post 'Getting Off Cigarettes'

TV advertising campaign character Lola is currently 'Getting Off Cigarettes' - and helping thousands of other smokers to quit too.
Lola's brief included photorealistic cigarettes in a cityscape dotted with giant cigarettes that breathes life into the advert aimed at highlighting the challenge of quitting smoking and remind smokers that many others are going through similar experiences.
Different rescue operations arrive on the scene to help smokers to 'get off' the cigarettes, illustrating the range of free stop smoking support provided by the NHS.
Lola’s brief was to add photo-realistic smoked and stubbed out cigarettes to live action plates. Lola was very involved, not just on the shoot, but in the pre-production process as well.
Commenting on the CG process Lola’s MD Grahame Andrew said: “The hardest part of the CG though was to get the right level of crinkles, and bends into the cigarettes. It's often quite a subjective thing. You make them like they really are, but because we were putting in stubbed out cigarettes, the perception of the length of the butts for example and the amount of distress of the cigarettes changes.
"You think you're really familiar with the look of a cigarette, but it's not until you give it a lot of attention that you realise some of the details involved. In the end you have to go for what looks right, sometimes in preference to what is right.”
Lola pre-visualised all shots, and produced an animatic that proved invaluable in making sure that all shots had the correct elements. It wasn't just a question of adding CG cigarettes to shots. Lola employed HDRI technology to make sure that the lighting of the cigarettes was completely accurate. Each shot was recorded for the time of day, and an HDRI sequence shot for each set up lighting situation. This information along with the relevant HDRI images is then taken back to Lola for the lighting of the CG cigarettes.
Lola also shot second unit green screen material on HD for the smaller people to help populate the background cigarettes. Main featured artists were first unit photography. Lola had two people on the shoot, Rob Harvey to supervise the VFX and Max Wright to take care of the HDRI images.
The cigarettes were all pre-built. There was also some R&D into generating the HDR images to make sure Lola got exactly the information and exposures that they required, and to make the generation of the HDR images from the photos as automatic and seamless as possible.
There was also a lot of 2D involvement. All the skies were replaced to give a more balanced feel to the commercial, since the wrong sky can give the game away in terms of the lighting of the CG cigarettes.
(SP)