VitaminWater ‘Hydrate the Hustle’

VitaminWater’s ‘Hydrate the Hustle’ commercial featuring Kevin Hart filled the legendary Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles with a computer-generated crowd. Achieving that scale meant digitally reconstructing both the historic venue and the on-camera talent so the CG audience could blend seamlessly with the live-action footage.

SCANable provided LiDAR/3D laser scans of the Shrine Auditorium along with 3D full-body scans of Kevin Hart and numerous extras, delivering the photogrammetry and laser-scan data used for the spot’s computer-generated crowd population.

A digital crowd made from real people

There is a version of crowd work that starts from a library of generic bodies. It is fast, and it looks like it.

Real audiences are not uniform. They vary in height, mass, posture, and proportion in ways that are difficult to author convincingly and trivial to capture. A modeler building variation by hand tends to vary the wrong things, because the differences that read at a distance are skeletal rather than cosmetic. Scanning actual people, and a range of them, gives a crowd system a population with genuine silhouette variety — which is what stops rows of extras from reading as instanced copies of one another.

That is what full-body scanning contributes to crowd work, quite separately from the venue it happens in.

Ornament is where an approximated venue gives itself away

A plain modern interior is comparatively easy to fake. A historic auditorium is not.

Ornate architecture is dense with detail nobody could reconstruct from memory and nobody would think to invent — moldings, coffered ceilings, box fronts, proscenium detail, the specific irregular rhythm of decorative work that was made by hand. That detail is also exactly what catches light and defines the room on camera.

LiDAR set scanning records it as measured surface rather than as impression. Our set and location scanning treats the ornament as data, not decoration.

Throughput is the constraint when the subject is a group

Scanning one performer is a scheduling detail. Scanning a group of them inside a live commercial shoot is a logistics problem.

Capture has to be fast per person, consistent between people, and non-disruptive to a set running around it. Everyone needs to be captured under the same conditions, on the same calibration, so the resulting assets share a common scale and a common look and can be dropped into one crowd system without per-asset correction afterward.

Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios are built for that pattern, and everything ships after cleanup and render-ready build.

Further commercial and advertising work is worth a look, as is the full service list.