With the Las Vegas Grand Prix taking place this weekend (now that they’ve fixed the track), it’s a good time to look back on how Final Pixel helped create the launch video for the ridiculously successful Oracle Red Bull Racing RB19.
Back at the start of the F1 season, Oracle Red Bull Racing, currently the dominant team in Formula One, launched its new RB19 car in New York. Everybody knew it would be quick, but no one would have guessed that it would break all records and win every race, bar one, so far this year.
As part of its launch video, the ever-active RedBull marketing team came up with the idea that the new car would be delivered to the wrong Manhattan in Nevada and then have to drive to New York for the launch, namechecking this season's Las Vegas, Austin, and Miami F1 racetracks along the way.
The only wrinkle was that at the time of the shoot, the embargoed Oracle RB19 car was completely confidential and could not be seen by the public anywhere. That made shooting on location unfeasible, not to mention the problems of driving F1 cars on real roads (you can insert your own pithy comments about Las Vegas manhole covers here).
To solve this, Final Pixel worked with some of its strategic partners - the XPLOR team and Production Park in West Yorkshire, UK - to create Formula 1’s first-ever virtual production campaign.
The team blended real archive footage, video plates, and drone footage with environments entirely built in Unreal Engine, as well as CGI and VFX, to create the finished video, which is also incidentally a carbon net zero production as a result.
Have a look at how they did it below.