Anish Kapoor's huge stainless steel balloon sculpture floats gently out of the Manhattan sky to land on-site at 56 Leonard Street, where it is compressed into final form under the descending weight of architects' Herzog & de Meuron's twisted-glass and steel 57-story hi-rise residential tower.
So opens directing and new media studio Tronic's stunning hi-def branding production, which was designed by partners Jessi Seppi and Vivian Rosenthal, themselves Columbia University trained architects, to conceptually mirror the architects' intent while providing the foundation for the luxury properties' marketing program. Music and sound design was provided by Nylon.
Always Innovating - Herzog & de Meuron
Renown for their ability to strike an uncanny balance between strict refinement and pure invention, Herzog & de Meuron, whose credits include internationally renown buildings like the Beijing National Stadium (Bird's nest) and the Tate Modern, at Bankside, London, opens its fourth decade poised to reinvent another great architectural prototype with its first hi-rise residential tower, located in Manhattan's Tribeca Historic District.
"We felt honored to be chosen to work on this project for these Pritzker Prize-winning architects," said Jesse Seppi, whose studio Tronic is also engaged in a project for Daniel Liebeskind. "Conceptually and aesthetically we share the same language with architects, so the working process is much smoother," he adds. We generally handle high-level commercial work, but we took on this project because it represents a new level of filmic-style brand videos that present a lifestyle in an artistic manner. We were challenged to show how the building was conceived, which we felt could best be done by opening at the base with the wonderful Kapoor sculpture and continuing with the elements of each floor descending from the Manhattan sky into place."
Aerial View - Descending Tower Elements
To create the feeling of the glass and steel elements floating into place, Tronic directed a helicopter shoot to have produce reference footage of the site and to capture the breathtaking views from the apartments looking out. " It's a very tall building for the neighborhood at 56 stories, and like typical Manhattan towers the higher you climb the better the view," said Seppi. "We wanted to take full advantage of that fact so conceptually we used the sky as a place of origin, focusing on the building's connection to the sky, as well as spending a great deal of time refining the architectural aspects of the experience."
Tronic modeled all of the buildings from some six square-blocks of the neighborhood from scratch to provide their animators complete creative control and flexibility with the camera moves in the opening sequences. The wider shots of the CG building were then composited into the live- action helicopter footage.
"We aspired to create a dramatic opening narrative in which Anish Kapoor's amazing stainless steel sculpture floats onto the ground plane and becomes compressed into final form as the first cantilevered structure descends into place. Creating the reflections and refractions of the neighboring buildings as the stainless steel form shifts shape and settles was especially challenging," said Tronic's Rosenthal.
One of the greatest production challenges was determining how to mix the live-action footage with the CG elements. "We do have quite a few challenging helicopter shots but found the biggest technical challenge was creating a smooth zoom movement from the air. For instance, in the last shot, where we spin around the completed building in a 360, we produced that entire sequence in 3D, including modeling the shorelines of New Jersey and lower Manhattan. Needless to say, that required an enormous amount of rendering and hard work but we wanted to go the extra mile to polish this amazing building," added Seppi.