Sykes Holiday Cottages came to ABF Pictures with a creative idea that the agency could not pull off without virtual production. A single woman moving seamlessly between cottages, lodges, holiday parks, hot tubs and family homes, all in a continuous oner. ABF call it "The Spin". A multi-week location shoot would have killed the timeline. Green-screen would have flattened the illusion. We rebuilt every Sykes property type as a photoreal UE5 environment from the client's own listing photos, lit them on our LED wall in Leeds, and shot a national TV, cinema and social campaign across two pre-lit days in November. No travel, no weather windows, no location bookings. Brief in October. On air by 22 December.
Christian Holtappel directed the spot from a 3D animatic he built before the crew was called. Every match-cut occlusion, every rotational "Spin" transition, every costume change hidden behind the action of the performer was pre-cued on motion control through G6's Genosis 32 macro lens. By the time talent walked on stage, the robot move, the cut point and the camera framing were already locked. Nothing was being figured out on the day. James Pierechod led the technical pipeline.
Kirill San shot in RED 8K at 25fps, captured wider than delivery so the same take could be reframed in post into 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1. Jo Kendall produced. The hot tub sequence was filmed dry. Steam and bubbles in-camera, no real water on set, no wrap-and-dry turnaround between takes. Two pre-lit shoot days. One 8K master. Six finished commercial cuts and a stills package.
The defining move was rebuilding Sykes' real properties as photoreal UE5 environments rather than scouting them. Working from the client's own listing photography, the team generated and upscaled reference imagery in AI, fed it into Unreal Engine, and rendered live backgrounds for the LED wall. Every environment was lit-matched to talent before each setup, so the wall and the stage read as one continuous world.
Edit assembly began the morning after wrap. The 8K master was reframed in post into 4K 16:9, HD 9:16 and HD 1:1, with two length variants per format. Six finished commercial cuts from one shoot. ABF originally briefed Tungsten for online and social only. The work cleared the bar for a national TV and cinema buy mid-flight, without a single reshoot.
