A Rebuild Story
Client: Snap x Kygo
Role: Creative Director
Credits:
Executive Producer: Kyle Thompson
Creative Director: Ryan DeCarlo
Producer: Ashlee Buss
Editor: Zachary Kinzinger
3D Artists: Faraz Abbasi, Eric Ramin
Motion Design: Faraz Abbasi
Assistant Producer: Brooke Partian
Background
Snap brought its AR platform to Kygo's live shows at Ushuaïa Ibiza, a full augmented stage world, palm trees, and light dropped over a real crowd in real time. Real event, real AR. My job was to turn it into a film that showed the world what happened in that room.
Problem
The AR was live, and that was the problem. It looked incredible in the venue, but it didn't capture. The footage we had didn't read as AR on screen, and there wasn't enough of it to cut a film from. We had a remarkable event and no usable way to show it.
Challenge
How do you edit an AR experience when the footage doesn't read as AR? We couldn't shoot more, the shows were over. The only way to make the film was to make the AR exist again, on screen, accurately enough that it matched what the crowd actually saw.
Approach
So we rebuilt it. I directed the reconstruction and worked in the scenes myself, tracking the real concert footage in Cinema 4D and re-animating the AR from the ground up: the palm trees, the light, the stage objects, locked back into the live plates so they sat in the venue the way they did that night. Not stock replacements. A faithful rebuild of the real experience, made to read on camera where the original capture couldn't. That rebuild is the film.
Snap Summit '23
Results
The reel became the way Snap showed the Kygo AR experience beyond the room, presented at Snap Summit '23, in front of the live audience and a global stream of roughly 30,000. When it played, the room broke into applause.