The project was River Film’s first major job in New York, and one of the most poignant. The brief was to present the building as a new icon within the world’s most famous skyline.
The goal was for the building to be mentioned alongside the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building whenever people think of New York City.
The team asked how to achieve this and how to do justice to such a significant building.
River Film joined when construction was already well advanced, so they used live-action footage shot from a helicopter to convey the building’s enormous scale.
A great deal of effort went into composing the right shots and tessellating them so the building would be established as an icon in its own right.
Rather than a conventional architectural rendering approach, the team used feature-film production techniques, applying very high-quality textures to a simple model of the building to make it look striking.
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