I randomly saw BTS footage of The Mandalorian on a lazy afternoon and I’ve been obsessed with virtual productions ever since. As someone who’s painstakingly rotoscoped the green out of frizzy hair and the spaces between fingers, I despise the boring and meticulous labor that comes with filming on greenscreen.

Danny Rosenberg, a director at Cafeteria Films, reached out to spitball some ideas for Aroma360, a company that sells a device that pumps fragrances through a home’s HVAC system to make it smell luxurious. He was collaborating with Amber Joy Layne, a writer and stand-up comedian, and they were pitching ideas and campaign concepts to Benny Aboud, Aroma360’s CEO. Benny thought the scripts were funny, but felt it needed a bigger “wow factor.”

Benny loves sci-fi and Back to the Future, so Amber wrote a new series of scripts based on the concept of “Smelleportation,” where characters are whisked away to exotic locations at the “speed of smell.” In each spot, homeowners enter a sci-fi product testing facility and meet Romy (played by Amber), a quirky Aroma360 spokeswoman. Romy presents the Van Gogh (one of Aroma360’s products) and presses a button to activate the device. The characters instantaneously “smelleport” to an exotic destination, emphasizing smell is the greatest sense tied to memory and Aroma360 will help your home smell like a luxurious vacation. Adding to the “wow factor,” Danny pitched shooting the entire campaign in an LED volume in the same way Disney films all the Star Wars TV shows and movies.

Benny loved the Smelleportation script and approved shooting the campaign at Vu Tampa, a virtual production studio in the Vu Network. After months of back and forth, Danny and Amber finally sold the campaign; now the biggest challenge was figuring out how to shoot a series of commercials in a virtual production studio. This is when I was brought in.

On a brisk autumn afternoon, I had a brainstorming session with Danny on our office rooftop. Our main topic of discussion was deciding what “smelleportation” looked like. We knew we wanted to transport our characters from a product testing facility to an exotic location, and each spot would end with the characters traveling back to their living room, as if they were in their homes the entire time. We figured out the structure of each commercial but hadn’t figured out how the visuals would work for the transition. Initially, Amber would press a button and the room would digitally dissolve into the vacation location, as if they were in Star Trek’s holodeck or X-Men’s Cerebro, but we thought that was boring. It also seemed like something we could shoot in a practical location or on greenscreen. Since we were shooting this virtually, I wanted to use the technology to its maximum potential.

I asked Danny, “if we were actually shooting this on location, in Hawaii, and we had an unlimited budget, what would you do?” I explained I could build all our locations in Unreal Engine and mimic any camera movement, so we’re mostly limited to our imaginations. Danny took a second to think and his eyes lit up.

“What if it were like one of those 3D rides at Universal Studios?” he asked. “Can the characters sit on a couch like a seat on a roller coaster and they fly over the ocean at the speed of sound and land at a five-star resort?”

“Of course, we can. We can literally do anything we want.” I replied.

We talked late into the evening, developing three scripts around the “wild ride from the seat of a couch” concept. We knew the script would benefit from having wild reactions from our actors, so we envisioned shots of them screaming and their hair blowing back as they zoomed through the sky. By approaching this from a “what would be way too expensive to shoot in a practical location” mindset, we thought of impractical locations for each script to take place in; a private island on a Hawaiian archipelago, a field of cherry blossoms high in the mountains of Japan, and a waterfall deep in the Amazon rainforest.

Aligned on script and visuals, the next step was to start building the locations in Unreal Engine 5, but before I could do that, I had to learn Unreal Engine 5. Prior to this, I had zero experience in 3D game design. I used to make RPGs using Macromedia’s version of Flash back in middle school, but that was a long time ago and it covered only two dimensions. I had six weeks until our shoot date, so within that period, I had to learn Unreal, design and build five different environments for each location, and create a transition for each spot. I started feverishly watching YouTube tutorials.

First, I learned the basic controls and how to navigate the UI in 3D space. Then I learned about crafting landscapes, placing characters and objects, and lighting them. I felt the key to these commercials was figuring out the transition. I learned how to build an island, surrounded it with water and created a test Hawaii. I added mannequin characters and placed them on a couch and animated a scene where they fly over the ocean to meet Romy. I had to learn how to maneuver a camera in Unreal. Fortunately, I know how cameras work in real life, so it wasn’t hard understanding the options for all the different focal lengths and aperture settings. I also know how to shoot cinematically, so translating these skills to a virtual environment in Unreal wasn’t too difficult. I created a test transition and sent it to Benny. He loved it.