The Nationale Postcode Loterij is one of the biggest lotteries in the Netherlands. Recently I was asked to produce still images for their most important event of the year: the End-of-Year Lottery. A challenging job. The project required a combination of photography, use of image-banks, 3d CGI techniques, modelmaking, set-preparation and many days in Photoshop to put all of this toghether in one image. In the beginning there was only the sketch above, with little to no room for interpretation. This is what the image was expected to look like.
The first step was the search for a suitable winter-background. The famous "Zaansche Schans", a historic quarter north of Amsterdam seemed just what we wanted. But with no snow and ice in August, I looked up various image-banks and found these images.
I stiched the two images together and changed color and densitiy into a night atmosphere. Then I added the enlighted windows and a starry sky.
Fortunately I have a hedge in front of my studio and a nice girlfriend willing to help me preparing it. Snow from a spraycan and salt was used to give the hedge a snowy look.
That looks great! Now search for a stockfile of a snowy garden.
There it is! Just what I need.
Eat your heart out, Bob Ross. Things don't get much easier than this.
For the book's interior I needed small historic streets. I searched for them in the North-Holland region and found these beautiful houses in Edam. I combined daytime and nighttime exposures to create a warm and cosy atmosphere. But not much snow here either...
Ha! I can fix that. It doesn't have to be very highres. It's only for the stages behind in the pop-up book.
Same for the right side of the street.
The lotteries' ambassadors were photographed in my studio.
and some extras...
A 3d CGI model of the books interior was created by Marcus Driessen (Artbox Amsterdam). Houses, street and people were put in their position. An existing wireframe of the truck was rendered and added.
A small church gave the book some extra depth
The 3d file was then imported in the Photoshop file. Together with a picture of a table, a book and Dutch tv-celebrity Quinty
The 3d file was then imported into Photoshop. It still needed a lot of adjustments to make it more photorealistic, as is often the case with CGI artwork. Glosses, glows and subtle shadows were added. Little stand for the five ambassadors I created also in PS. Dutch tv-celebrity Quinty Trustfull was photographed behind a table, holding the book.
The Final result. The complete Photoshop file contains over 230 different layers. A complicated but nice job is finished. In the outcome of the lottery end of December I was less fortunate...
