The largest and most film-like augmented reality experience to date, created to promote the season premieres of the acclaimed shows The Walking Dead, Homeland, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Sleepy Hollow.
Client
Fox International Channels
Year
2014
Type
Augmented Reality Event
Technology
VFX and Post Production
Custom made real time software
WHY Fox International Channels wanted to promote the season premieres of the acclaimed shows The Walking Dead, Homeland, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Sleepy Hollow. We created the largest and most film-like augmented reality experience to date.
WHAT In a cinematic, never-before-seen experience in downtown Madrid, hundreds of people were immersed in the universe of these TV shows in real time. Through cutting-edge augmented reality technology and visual effects, fictional characters were “extracted,” literally appearing among the crowd as if they were actually there.
Four augmented reality micro-episodes were produced to convey the atmosphere of each show. Fiction took over reality as zombies from The Walking Dead surrounded the viewers. An undercover operation from Homeland surprised them, while supernatural situations from Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Sleepy Hollow unfolded before their eyes.
Cinematic Augmented Reality?
Augmented reality usually blends virtual elements into the real world. In this case, the challenge was quite the opposite: to fully immerse people in cinematic scenes, where they could coexist with fictional characters. Creating a film-like experience required the use of a cinematic language. At Wildbytes, we developed a technique to analyze and extract the camera movements from the original shots, producing the same movements and cuts with the live cameras that captured the audience in real time.
An unprecedented use of the rotoscoping technique, which traces an actor’s silhouette frame by frame, allowed the shows’ characters to be inserted in the live feed. More than 6,000 frames were rotoscoped to believably bring these fictional characters into the real world.
Other tech details include a real-time color correction system to produce the look of each show in the live cameras, 5.1 surround sound in the whole square, and a full transformation of the environment using 3D VFX to carry the viewers into new worlds.
Video recap of the whole event
Making of teaser (hit cc for subtitles in English)
Haven’t you seen enough?… Just in case, some gif goodies of our rotoscoping at work:
