LONDON EYE

OUTERNET

London Eye
Outernet

Expanding from the London Eye Taxi and Mega Bus deliverables, Peri worked with the elvis LE team to produce a set of animation to display London Eye transforming from sunny day time to a beautiful sun set. The work consist of CG render, compositing, colour grading and applying VFX to the scene. The aim is to build this animation as natural as possible. Bringing London Eye to the wider audiences, showcasing in the heart of centre London Tottenham Court Road train station Outernet screens.

Client: Merlin Entertainment, London Eye
Worked with: Elvis Communication

CG Renders

Compositing

Grading & VFX

Before showing the final animation,
shall we talk about process and what's behind the scene?

Check out full CG break down on LE Taxi & Mega Bus Project page!

FULL CG BREAKDOWN

The R&D Phase

The brief was asked to produce 2 set of animation using the new 10K renders of 3D London Eye with the new 10K London background (Still image) transforming from sunny day time to sun set. I have done some R&D to test out how to bring this idea to life from a motion and technical POV.

Testing phase

At the R&D stage, I was mainly testing out which route to go with in order to transform from daytime sunny London to a beautiful sun set. At first, I tried out using stock footage to apply on the sky, and some quick colour adjustment + luts to see how it looks. After more testing, I have proposed for this following route:

Using Timelapse sunset footage applying to the skyline. Applying Luts to cityscape and using grading techniques to blend in sunset lights and reflections. Below is some breakdown of my R&D and grading process.

Compositing
& Colour grading

Started from a 10K render of the CG London eye wheel, and london background image, I have first masked the timelapse footage over the skyline, and have the footage slowly fading in from around 15sec, as the full animation duration is 30sec in total. Then I retime the footage to make sure the footage fade in naturally to a darker sun set. Afterwards, it was compositing and colour grading time! Below is a breakdown of the process. Both landscape and portrait use the same techniques.

Turn around

The turn around was 3 days + 2 days R&D time.

Challenges

As the image was in 10K resolution, it become very heavy for AE to process after adding a couple of effects. The original render time was set to be 7h, and I managed to reduce this down to less than an hour after baking in many elements.

A short turn around was challenging as there were many details that required fixing + grading in order to create a natural transition from day time to sun set.

Other notes

I have also been working closely with the head of studio from elvis, to make sure the position of the wheels are seating within the safe zone and bang on seating right in the middle, along with all the special effects (i.e. lens flare, film grain, uni lights, and some final touches to create that WOW and OMG impact.