Fender: Year of the Strat
To celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Stratocaster, Fender launched "Year of the Strat," a global campaign anchored by a hero film featuring ten of the world's best Strat players, including Tom Morello, Nile Rodgers, and Tash Sultana, performing a collaborative cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Child (Slight Return)." The outdoor stage set was a direct homage to Hendrix's legendary Live In Maui performance.
I led virtual production on the shoot, running Unreal Engine for the live capture and building a custom pipeline that synced lighting, virtual sets, and motion control into a single unified system.
Built With
Syncing Light, Lens, and Virtual World
The core challenge was making three independent systems, a GrandMA3 DMX lighting console, the Unreal Engine virtual set, and a motion control rig, behave as one. I coded a custom sync pipeline that let the GrandMA3 board drive lighting cues that were mirrored in real time inside Unreal, so the virtual environment's lighting always matched the physical stage. Simultaneously, the motion control system fed live camera position data into Unreal for accurate virtual camera tracking.
I optimized the Unreal virtual set for smooth real-time playback during live capture, ensuring zero dropped frames under production conditions. I also integrated genlock and frame sync between Unreal and the camera system, locking every frame of the virtual render to the physical capture. The result was a seamless blend of real and virtual that held up on camera with minimal post-production.