Binyan and Anthem: The Amazing Brentwood backplates and 360s

The problem

The Amazing Brentwood is a multi-tower development in Burnaby. Binyan Studios, the visualisation studio producing the renderings for Anthem Properties Group, needed the real surroundings to build them on: backplate photographs at exactly the camera position, height and focal length of each rendered scene, and 360 panoramas at height to light and reflect the towers correctly. Each scene had a time of day, because the sun in the backplate has to match the sun in the render.

What we captured

Over three days in September 2021, the scenes were worked through in the order the light called for. The shot list for the main day:

Time	Scene	Camera	Capture	Height	Lens
08:00	S040	Cam 1	Backplate still	34 ft AGL	28 mm
11:00	S020	Cam 1	Backplate still	5.5 ft AGL	28 mm
12:30	S060	Cam 1	Backplate still	5.5 ft AGL	40 mm
12:30	S060	Cam 2	Reference	5.5 ft AGL
15:00	S010	Cam 1	Backplate still	5.5 ft AGL	28 mm
17:00	S100	Cam 2	360 panorama	60 ft AGL
17:00	S100	Cam 2	360 panorama	250 ft AGL
17:30	S170	Cam 2	360 panorama	427 ft AGL

The 360 plates from the viewer above are the ones that went to the renderer. The low backplates put the camera where a person or a rendered eye level would be. The 360s at 60, 250 and 427 ft give the renderer the sky, the horizon and the reflections a tower at that height actually sees. The highest capture sits above the standard ceiling for drone flight in Canada and was flown under the authorisation that height requires.

What changed

Binyan got every plate and panorama in the position, at the height and in the light their scene list specified, from one operator in one day. Anthem’s renderings were built on the real view.