10.09.2010
Taylor James Brings Westfield Out of Its Shell
Taylor James, the London-based creative production studio, has just announced its latest work for CHI & Partners with Westfield shopping centres’ latest national print campaign, ‘Fashion Lives’. The striking images, formed through the integration of CGI, photography and retouching, were unveiled and are running nationally until the end of October 2010 around London as well as prominent fashion magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair.
The original and eye-catching campaign depicts models leaving behind last season’s summer clothes as a cracked shell of their former selves and stepping out in this season’s latest threads. The images created by Taylor James are being used to promote the latest Autumn/Winter collections, available from array of stores within the Westfield centre. The urban retail mall based in West London is Europe’s largest, with over 275 stores.
Taylor James has been at the forefront of creative visual content creation for over ten years, specialising in print, interactive and broadcast media. Having CGI, retouching, photography and live action services all in-house enables the studio to offer a broad spectrum of innovative solutions for their clients. The team embraced their full artistic license when it came to the sculpting of the shells. Alex Pickup, Creative Lead at Taylor James explains the creative development process used to create this unique campaign:
“To bring this concept to life, first there was a three day photo-shoot to capture HDRI images of the models in their before and after poses, as well as the full 360° environment. This allowed us to capture every angle necessary to rebuild the models to their exact proportions and likeness in their CGI ‘shell’. Shooting the space also meant we could light the CGI objects exactly as it would have been on set, even capturing the correct shadows cast by the model in order to make it as realistic as possible.
“The photography was then used as a base to create the cracked glossy ‘shells’ through a process of sculpting and modelling in 3D, much like a fine artist would. This requires a lot of technical skill but also an artistic eye to ensure the models were instantly recognisable and that the shell looked photo-real in density and size. There is no automated process that can do this, we had to make each from scratch, like an artist would with clay. Creating the exact likeness of a person, whether it’s in illustration or sculpture can be really difficult.”
This attention to detail also proved crucial when creating other characteristics of the shell, like the cracks. Pickup continued, “The scale of the shot dictated how the cracks would look- they needed to stand out from quite far away but still be believable as if something had just come out of that gap, telling the story whilst also leaving enough of the body shell for the viewer to still make out that it belonged to that model.”
Once the different facets of CG were completed, the retouch team took over, introducing additional cracks and imperfections along the breaks on the shell, as well as the fragments lying on the floor, which helped to organically pull the scene together. The award-winning studio has paved the way in generating photo-realistic work and animation with such attention to detail, earning a solid reputation within the industry.
Working with some of the world’s leading brands, Taylor James relish all creative and technical challenges and working on this Westfield campaign was no exception. Pickup concludes, “When any project starts to come together at that final finessing stage, it’s always great. With Westfield, it was placing all of the CGI and photography into one, finally bringing the work to life. Many production houses don’t have that luxury, they get to the 85% stage of a project and they haven’t got the skills to bring the final elements together into a real-world environment, connecting CG to photography. With our long history in retouching we are at an advantage. We know what balancing and colour corrections are needed, how shadows should form to tie an image together. These are simple yet fundamental skills to make it look completely real.”
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