“A Kiss” tells the story of a young man dancing his way across the rooftops to his first kiss with a new lover. Directed by Jacob Sutton and choreographed by Hannes Langolf, it stars dancers Mr. Kriss (Kristián Mensa) and Regina Bakeeva, his girlfriend. 

They filmed the action outside on homemade rolling wooden boxes and taped off squares, up on the roof and in the street in East London and we were brought on to replace the wood and tape with animated brick and concrete boxes.

 
We first decided to build a procedural box-creating tool in Houdini, so we could adjust various parameters and be much more freeform in deciding which box went where. Jacob had shot high-resolution photos of the brickwork and stonework on location, and these were used as source material so the textures were as true as possible to what was captured in the film itself.

Next we set about doing layout. Mr. Kriss was extracted from the plates giving us more freedom to place, stabilise and animate him, and the props were all removed to give us clean plates to place our new boxes into. We did a bit of reracking to make him appear to be jumping around far higher than he was, and then it was a case of placing the boxes and picking our textures. We did a few passes of various randomisations and animations to get everything where we wanted.

Finally it was into comp to tie everything together, rebuild some lost limbs here and there, and also to pull off the shot of our dancer dangerously wobbling on the edge of a building; without ever being more than a foot off the ground.