Megan Thee Stallion & Dua Lipa

"Sweetest Pie"

Final music video on YT

The Brief

During 2022, when working at UPP Advertising, we were approached by the director Dave Mayers and production Freenjoy about a music video. Dua Lipa was teaming up with Megan Thee Stalion for a single. It was conceptualized by Megan, drawing inspiration from a dark, Hansel-and‑Gretel theme.

Lots of environments, mostly CG with some foreground parts being a real set with actors, the rest was bluescreens. Different kind of atmospheres, a collage horror sequence in the middle, men turning into dust, some snake tongues and very little time to do it! Perfect brief for an advertising department. Lets go! 🙂

The Process

I was brought on board by our VFX Supervisor Mario Dubec, who is always crazy enough to take on these types of projects :) to be his right hand man, art direct some scenes, help with keeping the visual in context and do a previz for the opening shot. My role as a generalist designer / visualization artist was being defined inside the studio at that time, after leaving my role as Head of 2D. I was developing a lot of skills and workflows on the fly and the whole project was kind of trial by fire.

Dave collaborated with One Pixel Brush for the concept art as usual. They were providing the designs nad 3D scenes in Blender for us and we were then translating them into our pipeline.

There were couple of designs that were still not quite finished, so we took over them to finalize them on our side, because the clock was ticking and we needed to move with our side of production.

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Check out OPB concept drop on Artstation

The Magic Forest Opening

The was responsible for the opening long shot. We had a live action plate at the end of the camera panning to the two guys. We had the cool OPB concept art and we took all the custom tree assets - in shapes of women - and started to do the layout necessary for creating the long opening shot.

This was the moment we decided, I would make the previz for this shot in Unreal Engine. But! This was just at the moment, UE5 was released. And I mean, not a production ready build. It was the UE 5.0 Early Access - fuck it, lets take it and start using it - wild wild west territory style :)

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As I was building the previz, I started going deeper into the brand new features like nanite and lumen. It was super janky compared to later versions, but it got us thinking - there was actually not enough time and artist resources to do this whole crazy jungle scene in houdini, so what if we did all the 3 opening jungle shots inside UE? And because I’m also a ex-compositor, I can actually finish the shot from 0 to final comp. No pressure 🙂

I used assets from the awesome Rural Australia pack - Im sure you can spot it - and built the environment. But it was a collage of a render from UE, the far rocks and jungle was matte paint by Martin Kostuň, the waterfall was comped from stock footage of Iceland waterfall and then the live action guys comp in betweeen the environment at the end of the shot. I did the comp in After Effects in ACEScg workflow.

To be completely honest the opening shots do look like a game engine and lack the visual fidelity and proper path tracer look. But we learned a lot on this and it pushed the visuals on other projects.

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Shots development

The Corridor

The corridor :) This was the entrance to the “lair” where the guys are trapped. The original concept didn’t work well visually — the singers didn’t stand out — so I redesigned it. I made it bright, with white birch and flowers… and of course, the teeth.

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The Cauldron Den

This environment was mostly designed, but we really struggled with the lighting. There were too many elements fighting for attention. I did a relight in Cinema 4D using Redshift, then passed the setup to our 3D team in Maya to finalize. I also did several overpaints for the compositors to help guide the viewer’s eye with color, values, and layout.

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The Magic Forest Dance

As the guys try to escape the lair through the magic forest, they climb and fall as Megan begins to dance. I did the layout for all these shots, placing the tree assets accordingly. I used Unreal’s Sequencer and the media plate feature to combine the tracked camera, the plate, and my UE scene.

At one point, we considered rendering these shots in UE too, but visually it didn’t hold up — the quality and our skills just weren’t there yet. So we moved everything into Houdini for proper treatment, and our 3D Houdini artist Alpay Küçük nailed it.

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The Conclusion

Big shoutout to all the compositors — Peter Nemec, Milan Hotárek, Petr Grubner, Miroslav Šikula, Ilgi Genc and I’m definitely forgetting a lot of people, it was quite some time ago.

The music video was graded by Stef Sonnenfeld at Company3. A good grade can always save a VFX shot at the last minute! :) This was a huge learning experience for me and the team. It also helped strengthen our relationship with the Production, Agency and Dave Meyers.

We won an award 2022 BERLIN COMMERCIAL AWARDS - Silver Winner and got nominated EPICA AWARDS - Nominee 2022 MTV VMAs. The video has over 90 million views on YouTube, which is insane.

Better quality on UPP Vimeo

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Thanks for checking out the project!

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