RIDERS REPUBLIC: THE FINISH LINE - SEE HOW IT WAS DONE

How do you shoot an action scene comprised of over 200 extreme sports riders in the middle of a pandemic? Sticking to your vision and thinking out of the box. 

Director and Sauvaget.TV founder Ernest Desumbila led a fearless team through all the logistic hurdles the pandemic presented. What had been thought of as an on-location shoot transformed into a controlled on-set shoot. What had been real life mountains became construction work, we recreated a mountain slope in a green screen set. And suddenly, what had presented itself as a limitation became the key to absolute creative freedom. "We were able to do something much more cinematic, a piece that channeled video game visual codes and made them work in our favour" recalls Ernest Desumbila.  

The spot "was shot at different speeds; high speed, with phantom, different angles, from a meticulously worked storyboard and with a very powerful narrative". He also explains how, together with the production team, he achieved the result he had envisioned: "If we couldn't ski on a real mountain, we already had a plan B: skiing in a studio with a giant ramp our team built. The riders would jump on skis and we would mimic the movements as if they were in a real location. We used 3D Scan, Unreal, fans, harnesses and ramps." 

We pride ourselves in having built the means necessary to deliver the story as it was originally created, pandemic restrictions and technical challenges be damned. Today, more than 16M people have watched Ubisoft's official trailer and the visuals from "The Finish Line" have become ingrained with the game's visual language. We couldn't be happier to share the behind the scenes process with you.