ClubWPT came to us last year looking to produce a live spot for a TV campaign. ClubWPT is the online gaming arm of the World Poker Tour where players can compete to win real cash and prizes in the comfort of their own living room.
The concept was to have our hero character become so immersed in his online gaming that his whole world transforms around him and he is suddenly on the set of the World Poker Tour. To fully transform our environment, we shot our initial scenes in an apartment set up, and then moved to a green screen so that our animators could add in the imaginary world.
Here’s a look at how this commercial video production all came together:
Going Behind The Scenes
To capture the production process, we had Gwendolyn Brooks High School student Moriah Dowd filming a behind the scenes short. Moriah is an aspiring filmmaker who we met at Future Founders. She did the shoot and edit all on her own!
A note from our director, Andrew Freer:
“It’s exciting to be able to create an entire world from scratch. In this particular project we wanted to capture the transition from a guy playing poker in his apartment to a poker room floor. To make this transition happen seamlessly we needed to match lighting as close as possible between the apartment set and the green screen we were shooting on. We had to keep track of lighting placement to match one room to the next and then we panned the light off of the green screen in order to mimic the room going dark as the sun went down.
We had a lot of fun playing with practical lighting effects to add to the feeling that our talent was in the poker tournament environment. We flashed, panned and dimmed lots of colored lights which helped the post-production team with their challenge of making the environment believable.
We shot the video on a Red Epic – which is an amazing high resolution 4K camera. We created the edit and then handed off the original Red files to the 3D team, so they could work with the RAW 4k resolution files and were better able to add in the 3D files. The tracking on the table of the 3D poker chips as the camera moves in some scenes was quite incredible and time intensive.”
We really enjoyed the challenge that this project presented and can’t wait for the next! What has been an interesting challenge that you’ve faced when making video?