Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Season 2027 Launch Campaign
Each year, we work with the Brandenburg to create a trailer film for their upcoming performance season. This year's trailer features a selection of the orchestra’s musicians in surreal, impressionistic landscapes of colour inspired by Australian nature. The musical piece—Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A Major, RV335, “The Cuckow”: III. Allegro—was chosen for its carousel-like feeling, where the music rises and falls like a continuous flight. This felt perfect for a traversing camera that takes the viewer on a visually rich journey from performer to performer.
The painterly quality was achieved using a digital scanning technique called 3D Gaussian Splatting. 3DGS takes images and uses them to create three-dimensional colour clouds based on the spatial relationships between them. These point clouds place colour values derived from photographs or video footage into 3D space, blurring them together to create a dimensional emulation of the environment. While this technique is usually used to achieve accurate realism, we manipulated the process to lessen the fidelity of the visualisations, intentionally skewing towards a rougher, more painterly aesthetic.
This approach allowed us to separate the filming of the musicians from the location environments, meaning we could be more adventurous with our settings. Due to difficult scheduling, we were unable to take the musicians to far-flung locations. Instead, we shot them in a rehearsal room at the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra offices in Sydney.
The process required extensive imagery and forced the musicians to hold poses for long periods. Crucially, the background and lighting did not matter, as we could seamlessly insert their digital captures into environments we had shot around Sydney at a different time. A variety of natural locations were recorded—from sandstone cliffs and slot canyons to lush rainforests—all within a day's drive of Sydney.
