Case Study

RINA SAWAYAMA: LUCID

Bild Studios and Real Good Liars use a virtual production workflow in Notch to turn Rina Sawayama’s dreams into reality for her new music video ‘Lucid’.

Keen to demonstrate the capabilities of their pioneering virtual production workflow, Bild Studios and Real Good Liars teamed up to create Rina Sawayama’s music video ‘Lucid’. Filmed this summer, with strict COVID protocols in place, at MARS – Bild Studios’s own virtual production studio, the production is on the cutting edge of contemporary film production.

Real Good Liars and Rina Sawayama conceived the narrative story at the heart of ‘Lucid’. The story follows Rina as she traverses from her LA. Mansion into a dream world where she meets and falls in love with an alternate version of herself. Creative director Dave Ferner envisioned an illustrative style in his storyboards of the enchanting animated dream world. Real Good Liars got into the design of the world, creating a colour script and blocking out the 3D environments. The scenes were built at a base level in Blender and then textured and lit in Notch for real-time rendering.

The ability to dynamically update any scene quickly is perhaps one of Notch’s greatest strengths. Notch is responsive to the creative director’s vision: colour, beat, sizes, scales – everything is a parameter that can be changed live on the LED MARS stage. Working in Notch we could replicate the director’s style and achieve the same visual quality as you would do in a non-real-time 3D software package.

David Bajt, technical director, Bild Studios

‘Lucid’ features flying, reflections, forests and a duplicate of Rina Sawayama. To execute the technically challenging elements, the team at Bild unified a range of hardware technologies such as camera tracking and motion capture in perfect harmony, using Notch and disguise. They even created a few custom tools along the way. For example, a Python script that exports Blender’s Collection Instances as CSV table data arrays that could drive Notch’s Cloner system. These cloner systems are responsible for dense forests made up of hundreds of trees and thousands of animated blades of grass, all fully controlled by the artists and rendered in real-time. Limited by creativity only, the team were able to transport Rina to fantastical worlds identical in composition to those storyboarded by Dave Ferner. The resulting video imbues the pure creativity and endless possibilities of a technically brilliant virtual production workflow.