The Unfiltered History Tour

We had five weeks and a strict budget. The VFX team had a frugal budget to spend on assets, which meant we couldn't buy high-quality scans and had to build everything from photo reference. Our workflow was optimized to a great degree to allow as much parallel work as possible.

Ronak and I had a working blockout of the film in less than a week, which was possible because of the high level of trust from the client. We pushed our in-house pipeline using Blender, After Effects, and Substance Painter. I handled blockouts, camera work, and animation while the 3D artists working with me modeled assets in parallel. Our file management was pristine, so we replaced proxy geometry with finished models seamlessly without breaking animation or camera work. This parallel production approach meant we didn't waste time waiting for assets to be finished before we could start animating.

The Great Court of the British Museum had to be architecturally accurate because that space is iconic and recognizable. The glass roof structure, the curve of the reading room at the center, the scale of the space all needed to be right or people wouldn't believe they were looking at the real place. The other hallways were more abstract, connected by consistent lighting and camera language rather than exact architectural replication.

The illustrations that appear in the AR filters (created by the broader campaign team, inspired by Akira Kurosawa's high-contrast black and white films) were designed to match the emotional weight of the indigenous narrators' stories. When Instagram initially rejected the filters for being "too brutal" and "excessively violent," the team had to iterate nearly 20 times before approval. The violence depicted wasn't gratuitous, it was historically accurate. That tension between what Instagram deemed acceptable and what actually happened is part of the project's critique.

Ronak and I pursued our instincts. The common thread between his directing vision and my visual language from The Silence of Day created a film that felt singular and unified. That instinct-driven collaboration is what made it work.