Party Casino/McLaren - Access Granted

PartyCasino has today launched a striking new campaign that showcases the extraordinary benefits that members of the online casino can access. Creatively devised by SNAP LDN alongside boutique VFX and finishing house Stone Dogs, the high-octane spot seamlessly blends CG and practical effects, highlighting the exclusive access given to the unseen world of Formula 1 and McLaren. The spot begins with a shot of an F1 driver speeding along a track, intercut with sprawling neon imagery and greyscale ‘stop’ and ‘road ahead closed’ symbols. These symbols are accompanied by a voiceover, claiming ‘if your name’s not down, you’re not coming in - no entry, access denied’. Suddenly, the McLaren driver shoots through a mountainous valley towards a bright triangular portal, granted entry to the hidden world of F1 thanks to PartyCasino’s membership. Finally able to take a look inside, we see an illuminated F1 car surrounded by tools floating in the air. As the driver gets inside the car and revs the engine, the tools drop to the floor. Stone Dogs was brought on board during the script stage, working with SNAP LDN and PartyCasino in the weeks running up to the shoot in Bulgaria. With a tight schedule and time difference to navigate, Stone Dogs supervised the shoot virtually from 6am GMT, working with director Jak Payne to get as much in-camera as possible each day - and ensuring they were on hand to advise on the ambitious and ever-changing production. With the F1 season currently in progress, the team was unable to access a racing car with an engine - and instead organised for an engineer to be shot in a static McLaren. Photoreal CG, including particle and environmental elements, were then added, flying past the car to give the impression of the vehicle moving at high speed. This process was enhanced on the shoot by a giant LCD screen with moving images and additional lighting, whilst Stone Dogs also provided 2D work, including set clean/extensions and wire removal. Stone Dogs called on CG studio Orchard for key elements in the film. Martin Cook, Managing Director at Orchard comments: “It was amazing to work with Dave, Brian and the team at Stone Dogs on quite an unusual project. From a CG point of view, right from the start, we knew we had to approach this slightly differently. The shots had to be as realistic but were set in a completely other-worldly environment for an F1 car. At Orchard, our approach to CG is to keep it simple and produce CG to briefs as efficiently as possible. Each of our artists has experience directing sequences or entire CG projects from concept to delivery. This helps massively on projects like this, as the concept was quite open and left to the artist to visualise. We are really pleased with the final shots and think they add a scope to the overall commercial which was very hard to achieve on these tighter budgets until recently.” A key moment during production was capturing the shot of tools levitating around McLaren’s car. Instead of CG, the team worked to make this a practical element, hanging the tools with wire before dropping them around the car. With the vinyl floor prone to damage and a time-consuming rig to set up, they could only manage two takes for the shot. After the first attempt saw only half the tools fully drop, the team reset the rig and successfully captured the action seen in the final spot. Brian Carbin, Co-Owner/Flame Artist at Stone Dogs, comments: “We were excited to get a call from long time collaborators SNAP to help with this project. Fast cars with super slick creative, yes please! With a tight turn around, we got started on the CG aspects straight away as we prepared for the live action elements. In many of the studio scenes we had to give the car the appearance of moving at an extremely high speed by adding atmospheric effects along with giving the tyres and road motion blur and textures you’d expect in a real world environment. These cars top out at nearly 235mph and we rarely dropped below that! We are really proud of what was achieved. Hats off to Jak Payne and Matt Hynds for setting us such a rewarding challenge.” Matt Hynds, Associate Creative Director at SNAP LDN, comments: “One day I will ask Stone Dogs to do a really simple job for me. This job, however, was not one of those times. It was properly complicated in fact. But as usual, they took everything in their stride. Whatever the thing that was asked of them was, they finished it off with a level of quality that was staggering seeing as they were never given much time to do it. Along with Jak Payne, they have turned my A4 script into a visual delight of an ad.”