XR Campaign.
Famous Footwear XR -
Case study.
XR, or LED Stages, or Volume stages, have a lot of names, but the basic idea is that you have a massive LED screen that you can use to create any environment you want to film as the background for your shot.
We’ve all seen it used aplenty as the mountainous planets of sci-fi films, and I have used the tool a lot to create shots where we couldn’t shoot on location due to production or creative issues. But as usual, I am always more interested in misusing tools, finding ways to use them in ways they were never designed for.
(The Roland 808 was designed to be a drum machine to make demo tracks in the studio, but before long producers like Dr Dre were using the tom drum sound to play basslines… and that classic 808 bass sound was born. It was never meant to be used like that, the designers had no idea that people would want to do that, but as soon as artists got their hands on it… the rest was history.)
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What fascinated me about this tool was that you have access to a massive, fully interactive light source, that you can think of as being able to move tone, color and luminance through in a three dimensional fashion. My mind immediately went to what this could mean in terms of portraiture, being able to move key and fill lights with total impunity, rather than moving physical lights around and changing their colors. I could pull light from the rear, backlighting the subject, around to the sides, rimlighting them, changing colors seamlessly as i did so, or instantaneously moving a neutral uplight to a colored side key and fill of a different color.
The not only visual possibilities, but also what this meant from a story/character perspective were incredibly exciting.
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Coming from an arts background, this almost seemed to flip the dynamic between the subject and the ground - most of the time we think of integrating design into photographic image, but here we are placing the subject into the design, in camera.
With the Famous Footwear campaign, the client allowed me and my collaborators creative leeway to explore a lot of these ideas, experimenting over multiple shoots over an entire year. Having the same creative team, cinematographer, choreographer and screen operators meant we could figure out how to really use, and misuse this technology in interesting ways.
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While I have used this technology
