Brief

MPC was tasked with bringing two colliding worlds together in a promo for this season’s FX’s Emmy-winning drama, American Horror Story trailer, using stunning visuals that look and feel disturbingly real.

Solution

Embracing a healthy level of surrealism, we created giant waves of sand crashing into a desert lighthouse and various shots of desolate sand dunes colliding with impossibly big ocean waves. Given the surrealist qualities of scale, our artists anchored elements in the physical world as much as possible.  We also provided various visual effects including a multi-limbed spider-like creature and a rubber man who turns into microgravitational spheres.  

On the major CGI simulation shots – a key early step was to build concept art to find the look, shape, perspective, and style of the waves we were to be creating.  From there we built immense scenes, proceeding to iterate and perfect the animation and lighting to make the simulations feel as dramatic and as real as possible. Our compositing team weaved in beautiful details such as birds and rain elements, tying together all the elements in each shot.

Success

The trailer has received almost 1 million YouTube views and has reached over 10 million viewers.