Chrome Productions Utilises Virtual Production as a Sustainable Solution for Showcasing Standard Chartered’s Wide Range of Sectors

Following Chrome Productions’ and Standard Chartered’s successful partnership in presenting the various locations in which the bank operates, we once again came together to highlight some of the company’s key sectors. Tantamount to this project – and Standard Chartered’s business goals – is striving to be more sustainable. In addition to doing good for their clients, Standard Chartered wants to do good for the world. Central to this shoot was the issue of how to show the breadth of Standard Chartered’s reach across industries and the globe without having to travel around the world. Virtual production provided the ideal solution, offering us a way to showcase seven vastly different environments without leaving the UK. Not only did virtual production enable us to bring viewers on a journey through a modern office, airplane hangar, vast wind turbine farm, modern city, futuristic warehouse, dense jungle, and a train station, it also drastically reduced the carbon footprint that would have been generated had we filmed each of these locations in the physical world. “With Standard Chartered’s motto of ‘doing good in the world, [this] felt like a really excellent opportunity to tie it in with our production…virtual production by its nature is a lot more sustainable. 

A shoot on location can generate quite a big carbon footprint; obviously, if we were going to do this particular creative in the real world, we would have had lots of travel, lots of air miles and the impact on the environment would have been huge. This way, we get to stay in one space and view multiple environments,” says Hannah Lane, Producer at Chrome Productions. Once the creative direction was agreed, Chrome moved into pre-visualisation, essentially an animation that brought our ideas to life and allowed us to understand the navigation between each discrete ‘set.’ We worked very closely with the artists who designed the virtual environments, troubleshooting and doing multiple tests so that production and post production processes were incredibly streamlined. Although the timeframe was tight (just two weeks from first cut to final delivery), the teams at Chrome, Standard Chartered, and ATM Virtual solved the problem of shooting various environments in a much more sustainable way. Of her first virtual production shoot, actress Tara Hoyos-Martinez said, “This was way easier; it made reacting to the atmosphere and environment much easier and I was really pleasantly surprised. It is crazy to think that the team have managed to create so many different looks all from one space…if only travel was like this.”