bruno banani - Fragrance Lab

Bruno Banani returns to give us a second tour of his fragrance laboratory in the latest campaign instalment by Friend director duo Tim & Joe and the creative team at Grey London.

In our journey through Bruno’s lab we take a look at their best kept secrets to success and the extraordinary techniques they employ to guarantee you an irresistible scent composition. In the film we see Bruno has ramped up the essential oil extraction process to new levels, this time highlighting Bruno’s anti-gravity peppercorn chamber, an infinitely tall shelving storage facility and an automated laser powered bottle-sculpting robot.

Rushes worked closely with the agency and production teams from pre-production through to final delivery, to design and realise the wondrous lab components behind Bruno Banani’s mysterious methods.

Rushes design team took inspiration from the villain restraint rings in Superman 2 to craft the bottle forming robot. Combining the animated CG model with both simulated and real l world dust, smoke, glass and laser elements. The shot and CG elements were composited together with additional sparks, glows, lens flares and molten glass and dirt textures in Flame to create the final effect.

A combination of several CG and VFX techniques were also employed to realise both the infinite ladder and the anti-gravity peppercorn chamber shots. Following on-set VFX supervision, extended camera moves were created back at Rushes, we modelled set extensions and CG simulations of the actress, props and pipette drop in the ladder sequence.

Similarly, in the peppercorn chamber, tracking markers, rigging and a hero peppercorn were used on-set to enable us to realise the replacement CG modelled floating peppercorns back in Rushes.

CG augmentation of glasses, animated graphical readouts and lasers for the microwave and robot were also created. Plus, additional VFX was carried out on background and foreground elements inclusive of adding cinnamon dust, steam plumes, condensation on visors and general clean-up of doors, walls and floor.

The film was given its high end finish by Rushes Colourist Simona Cristea.

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