It is always our pleasure to collaborate with photographers and agencies on creative concepts, so when we were approached by award-winning photographer Todd Antony we were delighted to help realise his vision of a different New York.
The series Too Big to Fail stemmed from Todd reading an article on Urban Migration, where hundreds of rural villages have been abandoned with people heading to urban centres for better hopes of employment and faster technology.
This lead me to thinking I could potentially go and shoot a series on these villages but with the glut of images of abandoned places on the internet I thought the impact would be far greater if the narrative was posed from the opposite direction, displaying what would happen to our major urban and financial centres of the world should the migration process one day be reversed through necessity, with the banking mantra of Too Big to Fail being the apt title. explains Todd.
Matt & Stefano worked in tandem on this project. While Stefano started working on stitching together the photographed environment, Matt started by creating a mock up of the Times Square in CGI. This was to act as 3D placeholder for creating the CG elements of the image. Google maps and Google Warehouse were both really useful to work out geometry & get visuals for the 3D mockup. In addition this ended up being a really useful tool for communicating with Todd and finding out which building and what angle he shot the backplate from says Matt.Once the CG placeholder was created, Matt used Photoshop to create masks to map out areas where grass and moss would realistically appear. These masks were used to define in Modo where the 3D grass and weeds should grow. The ivy was then created using Ivy Generator. Matt comments, Ivy Generator is the perfect tool for this project, it uses the details within the geometry of the CG buildings to realistically grow and climb, in and out of crevices and window frames, up and down lamp posts and rubbish bins.
As we had spoken about the project before shooting, Todd had a clear idea of all the different elements needed to make the post-production look realistic explains Stefano. I consulted Matt & Stefano before shooting to make sure we covered all particulars that would make the CGI and retouching most effective and look realistic. With the abundance of CGI in things like movies and heavy handed HDR grading in a lot of images these days, realism and subtlety in the execution and overall grade of the image was key to me so that it was more readily accepted by the viewers mind. comments Todd.This had included Todd shooting the environment in a series of stages to create a derelict scene and capturing the split second when the billboards went black to make sure that Stefano had the true texture of dead pixels to work with. Todd also then photographed a series of dilapidated billboards to be composited into the scene.
It has been an absolute pleasure to collaborate with Todd on such an interesting and creative project, and watch this space for future images in the Too Big to Fail series! To see more of our work click here.
Credits
Client Portfolio
Photographer Todd Antony
CGI Artist Matt Painter
Retoucher Stefano Cherubini