How McDonald's lit up Christmas

What was your first impression of the brief from McDonalds? 

Jonny Freeman, 2D Supervisor: Reading the script brought a lot of excitement amongst the team, reviving such an iconic song for Christmas created a real buzz. 

Are any of the lights real, or are they all animated?

There are some minimal lights placed in one of the opening shots as reference that were not animated. Every light we see from the beat kicking in is created in CG and animated to the song. 

Can you walk us through the creative and technical process, from your initial ideas to crafting the final product?

JF: In our initial conversations with the director the reality of dressing the houses with lighting, animating them to the music and creating this for real at scale was near on impossible. We created a test to see how this was possible in CG which was successful and this was presented as a methodology. 

The team worked with a lighting installation company known for their amazing work around London, to gain a better understanding of how our lighting installations should look and feel.

The other complication was due to location restrictions some shots needed to be shot in daylight and not at night. So a second plan was formulated through grade and compositing to help us achieve day to night. 

Once the decision was made to move forward with a CG approach, we needed to find a way to create real lighting interaction on the cast and the car. A studio shoot was organised to accomplish this and the team used the CG renders to comp onto the car for reflections. 

The team worked with a lighting installation company known for their amazing work around London, to gain a better understanding of how our lighting installations should look and feel. A CG asset library was then created ready for the edit. 

Reading the script brought a lot of excitement amongst the team, reviving such an iconic song for Christmas created a real buzz.

Once street locations were decided the streets were lidar scanned to give us a base geometry to work from. Then a previs was created to help visualise the journey and start the animation timings. After receiving the edit, the CG team started refining the lidar scans so that the lighting structures could be integrated and environments could be re lit. 

Our real car was then re skinned to allow real world reflections and lighting/shadows. This allowed us to move forward with a more traditional workflow and renders were passed onto comp to add the final touches of photorealism. 

How long did it take to make? How many people did you have working on it? 

Hannah Ruddleston, Executive Producer: We had a 12 week schedule in total. We dedicated 5 weeks pre-production to developing a full 60sec previs ahead of shooting, as well as commencing CG build & conducting design & character animation development. Once we had edit lock we spent seven weeks in post production, tracking & creating CG geo for all the locations, populating with our CGI lights, creating our characters in CG, colour grading, and completing all visual effects. 

In total we had 27 artists working across this project.

We crafted the film to feel as though each house has some bespoke lighting, and there is so much of it that seeing it on each watch there's always something new to see. 

Where did your inspiration for the designs of the lights come from?

We initially pulled inspiration from references we found & also received from Nicolai & the Leo Burnett creative team of the overall look and feel. Then we worked up concepts and style frames with a lighting designer, they consulted on our designs and helped us to ground everything we were creating in realism.

Can you talk us through the grade for this project, I understand you had to work quite closely with the VFX team?

Richard Fearon, Colour - To ensure the style of the grade that myself, Nicolai and the creative team set at the beginning, it was important to work closely with the VFX crew at Black Kite to overcome a number of technical challenges. After some early testing with Jonny and Guillaume, we decided to create a bespoke colour/vfx pipeline for this job. 

Working in scene-referred AcesCG in Baselight, I balanced the shots and graded the day for night shots to match. I then rendered this pass into the plates for the CG team and flame to work from. Once I received a conform back from Flame, I was then able to start building on the look that was set earlier with the director and creatives. 

 It was important to work closely with the VFX crew at Black Kite to overcome a number of technical challenges within this project.

Being a Christmas commercial, the brief was to create something a little magical. The opening shots in the edit have an early evening, silver blue tone, which then complemented the introduction of the CG lights and characters. Using Baselights BLGs for flame was a huge benefit on this project as it allowed the team to see how the final grade would effect the CG lighting. Throughout the process I often updated the BLG files when a shot had new VFX added.