Featuring 100% CG dolls on strings, "Lemonade" is the first spot to launch DirecTV's new wire-free boxes.

We started with 3d sculpts of the marionettes and up-rezzed the models for rendering. We textured them and added all the small details you might find in plastic and silicone, including paint chips on their arm and leg joints, giving the father-in-law a lot more wear and tear for aging.

During the shoot we captured HDRIs, grey and chrome spheres and Macbeth charts for each shot, enabling us to fully replicate the lighting, then adding beauty lighting to the characters. We rendered with Arnold and used in-house hair-shaders developed by our RnD team that simulates an accurate representation. We shot elements like clean pates with repeated camera moves by the DP, tiled clean plates and shadow plates where we would turn off the main key lights and shoot the environment with ambient light.

We shot marionettes controlled by puppeteers (Legacy Effects). We had to dial in the right amount on awkwardness to match the clumsy comedy vibe in the scripts. At times we also toned down that exaggeration to convey the emotional connection between the humans and the marionettes. Each shot involved keyframe animation, cloth, hair and wire simulations. With the number of shots we had to cover in 6 weeks, our in house asset management system played a huge role in allowing us to work efficiently. We installed cloth, hair, and wire sim setups for the animation with ease, with a handful of shots calling for simulation that needed to be meticulously hand crafted to achieve the perfect marionettes.