CASE STUDY

ShortCut LED
Stage Uses
Disguise for Kayak
Commercial
In a hyper-connected society where amultitude of second-hand experiences often
shape our understanding of the world,
ﬁrst-hand experiences put life into
perspective. A new commercial for travel
search engine Kayak, which was shot with
the Disguise virtual production workﬂow,encourages viewers to travel and see life forthemselves.

www.disguise.one

Summary
Kayak’s ‘Think This' online ad campaign from
Danish agency &Co. / NoA and production
company Honeytrap, was shot on the Nordisk
Film ShortCut LED stage in Copenhagen. The
spot’s concept required photorealistic as well
as abstract and immersive locations to be shotin a single day with a limited timeframe
reserved for post-production.
The ShortCut LED stage, the world's ﬁrst full 360° LED stage,
helped ensure photorealistic lighting and an immersive feel.
Additionally, the stage’s Virtual Art Department assisted in thecreative deliveries for a true one-stop solution for the shoot, alltogether making it a project that would have been impossible
with traditional ﬁlming techniques and without ICVFX.

Image credits: Honeytrap

The challenge
The project required the ShortCut LED stage todeliver photorealistic content and lighting,motion graphics mapped to speciﬁc screen
areas, motion capture, Unreal Engine content
with camera tracking, content-mapped dolly
screens, a 4K plate extension and 12K video
plate collection with ShortCut’s own 360° ﬁlm
camera. Also, as the camera panned to theceiling and rotated full circle, the content
perspective needed to be corrected forseamless in-camera footage.
Mads Buus, one of three Virtual Production Supervisors at theShortCut LED stage, notes that delivering so many diﬀerent
types of content, ensuring easy and fast playback on the shootday, and meeting an overall tight schedule, was a bit
concerning in the beginning. Very strict project control andeﬃcient prep time were critical to the outcome.
The ShortCut LED stage had a ready-set system so it could
easily switch between eight diﬀerent pre-lit locations
encompassing still images, 12K video plates, a sequenced
Unreal project with camera tracking, extended 4K plates and an
additional dolly screen. But the entirety of the virtual
production pushed what the stage had done before.

Image credits: Honeytrap

The challenge
In terms of content, the Unreal portion was the mostchallenging for the stage. An iPhone recording from Director
Ian Isak served as a motion reference, which was captured via
Rokoko, cleaned up in Maya, then auto-rigged in Reallusion
where the mocap data was directly re-targeted to the 3D modelin Unreal.
Because the 3D model needed to frame bigger than what waspossible on the main screen, the upper part was displayed on
the LED ceiling with seamless perspective correction andcolour adjustments.

Image credits: Honeytrap

The solution
The ShortCut LED stage chose the Disguise VP
workﬂow to facilitate the complex project,
deploying four Disguise VX 2 media servers(with an additional unit on hand for backup),
four RX II render nodes running RenderStream
and a Fabric network switch.
Buus believes that the amount of content and the technicaldiversity of the spot would have been hard to manage without
the Disguise workﬂow. It serves as a “hub” where the stage
can gather, set up and organise everything needed for a given
project and make it easy to play back content.
For any virtual production to succeed, he also advocates
including the workﬂow very early in the creative process andhaving tight communication with the director and DP
throughout the process. Being able to test continuously and as
early as possible is also important. For the Kayak spot, Ian Isakand DP Jonas Blond were very invested in the process, had agood technical understanding and involved the ShortCut stage
early on, he reports.

Image credits: Honeytrap

SHORTCUT LED STAGE:“The Disguise system
integrations and clear
project overview are aunique combination whichempowers us to be morecreative, dynamic andfaster than we could havebeen with other solutions.”
Mads Buus
Virtual Production Supervisor

Results
Kayak’s commercial has been a YouTube hitfrom its ﬁrst month of release, very
successfully delivering its message of the joyof ﬁrst-hand travel experiences with the help of
virtual production.

1 month 1 million
from initial meetings toshoot day

YouTube views one monthafter release

The ShortCut stage solved the technical complexities posed by
the commercial and fulﬁlled the spot’s creative contentdeliveries. As a result, the client was very happy with theoutcome and how it has performed. Just as important, theprocess was creative, productive and made for good spirits on
the ShortCut side.

Watch it here

Image credits: Honeytrap

Disguise equipment used

VX 2RX II

FabricBuilding on the strength of theVX 4, the VX 2 gives you thefreedom to build out yourtechnical capacity depending on
the size of your production.

With RX II, you have the power tocreate photorealistic, high quality
real-time graphics, displayed
directly on your screens andvirtual sets.

Fabric is a pre-conﬁgured
network switch that seamlessly
connects Disguise servers streaming 4K content without
latency or dropped frames.

Find out more

Find out more

Disguise equipment used

Designer

RenderStream

Designer is the ultimate software
to visualise, design, andsequence projects at every stage,
from concept all the way throughto delivery.

RenderStream is an open-source
data transfer protocol supporting
Designer’s integration withthird-party render engines
including Unreal Engine, Notch,
TouchDesigner and Unity.

Find out more

Find out moreIn partnership with
Client: Kayak
Virtual Production: ShortCut LED Stage
Virtual Production Supervisor: Mads Buus
Unreal Developer: Rasmus Møller
Stage Manager: Allan Gram
Agency: &Co./ NoA
External production company: Honeytrap
Director: Ian Isak
Executive producer: Malene DyhringGet in touch
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