The Outpost strolls through a paper world

TA lo-fi ad which makes use of high-tech software.

The Outpost’s Paperworld advertisement, for stroller company Joolz, looks into the imagined future of a young couple expecting a baby. It changes their world from the real one into a paper one: buildings furl together, streets unravel, an aeroplane folds into existence. It feels like a friendlier, cosier version of Christopher Nolan’s city-bending movie Inception.

he Outpost strolls through a paper world.

It’s a good example of how bold imagination and coherent vision can create something just as eye-catching as an explodey effects sequence. The poly count here is low, but this works in the ad’s favour because everything looks like it’s meticulously folded out of sheets of paper. The transitions between the real and paper worlds are seamlessly handled, too.

The NVIDIA cluster was another key component in helping “CONSTRUCT” achieve its ambitious production goals. The graphics chip company’s render farm consists of about 150 GPUs stored in a number of NVIDIA Visual Computing Appliances (VCAs), which are stored in a render farm in Santa Clarita, about 30 miles from Blur Studio’s headquarters in Culver City. Thanks to the wonders of broadband, distance wasn’t a limiting factor, enabling Margo to render "CONSTRUCT" live and on location.

“We were sending the updated data from MotionBuilder in real-time up to NVIDIA’s GPU farm, rendering those updates at 24 frames per second, and then streaming them back down to my virtual camera that I had in the motion capture volume,” Kevin explains. “There was probably a couple hundred milliseconds delay between the performer doing his thing and me seeing the movement on the virtual camera. It’s noticeable but not crippling.”