LMT Sistēmas · TV spot · 2021
A spot for a company whose work is invisible. Riga, LiDAR-scanned from a drone and turned into particles.
LMT Sistēmas builds custom IT and IoT systems inside Latvia's largest mobile operator. Sensors, networks, software, the stuff between things. There is no product to put on a turntable. What there is, is a way of looking: everything as data, everything connected.
So the spot shows Riga the way their systems see it. The creative idea immediately became a technical question: how do you get a real city into a motion-graphics pipeline? Nothing was modelled by hand. If it appears, a drone scanned it. Real geometry, real colour, drawn as points instead of surfaces.
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A LiDAR drone from 3D Engineering flew each location and came back with up to 178 million points per scene. Nothing in a normal motion-graphics pipeline wants a file that size. The job became less about choosing the right software and more about learning enough of several unfamiliar ones to build a path through the problem.
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We cut a rough edit before touching the data, so we knew exactly what each shot would see. Then the scans went into CloudCompare and MeshLab, and everything outside the frame was deleted. The point count dropped by orders of magnitude. What was left could carry a particle system.
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Kristaps Kazaks built the particle systems on the meshes and flew one camera through all of them, so the spot reads as a single journey, not a slideshow of locations. The points gather into buildings, drift apart into spheres, and gather again somewhere else.
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Late in the job the brief grew a line: finish on real people, in the real office, without a cut. So the crew shot the final move with a drone, the same room was LiDAR-scanned, the footage was camera-tracked, and the particles were told to settle into their photographic positions as the camera arrives.
A thirty-second spot for television and digital, built from scans of real places, with sound by Dirty Deal Audio. Riga is in there, point for point. LMT filmed the making of it: the drone flights, the scans, the crew in the office. In Latvian.