The Coolest Shot I Ever Directed // League of Legends // How We Won The Job [steemit exclusive]

A couple years back my team and I were hired by Riot Games to shoot a promo for their upcoming League of Legends championship. At the time we were obsessed with using high speed robotic arms (the same robots that build Mercedes cars). We would attach a Phantom high speed camera and design camera moves with the robots that allowed us to follow motion at high speed, adding motion to slow motion to create a super dynamic and very hard to achieve tracking shot.

During our shoot for the League of Legends championship promo, we blew up a glass case around the league's trophy with pyrotechnic charges and perfectly timed four sparkers to release sparks throughout the explosion. We accounted for gravity and planned the robotic move to accelerate with and track the glass as it started falling. The result is this insane tracking shot that I believe to be the best of my career so far (the first few seconds is what it looked like in real time, then we go into slow motion, feel free to skip around):

Culprit Robotic Arm Test // League of Legends // Pre-color_Pre Vfx from Culprit Creative on Vimeo.

It was my favorite shot I'd ever directed, but for some reason, it was too crazy for the client and never made it into the final piece. Here's the final promo so you can see which shots made it:

At the end, I'll also be sharing the top secret info of how we won the job (what I like to call the secret sauce) in case it's of interest to anyone in the marketing/production/entertainment field. Please don't share this beyond Steemit for this exact reason.

Below is the never before seen (unfinished) behind the scenes. Password for the video is culprit.

Riot Games BTS from Culprit Creative on Vimeo.

Technical: We used Hive lights because they plugged right into a wall and create no flicker at 1000 frames per second. My dad was the gaffer on Pulp Fiction and he works on almost all my commercials. I'm lucky to have him make our work look amazing. Also he's the man. He helped us shape the light on the trophy to hide all the blemishes and make it look iconic.

Secret Sauce: this is a link for our interactive/parallax deck that we built to submit our bid to the client with:
http://riotgames.culpritcreative.com/
user: david
password: culprit