Live actor inside a "video game" — pixelated sets, low-poly costumes, NPC choreography, locked isometric camera. All shot in-camera, zero CGI, zero AI.
Director Oscar Hudson via MJZ for agency Isle of Any. Aired 98th Academy Awards (March 15, 2026). Shot Cape Town via Gatehouse Commercials.
Details below pulled from Hudson's own "How They Made This" interview (Frame Set)
Shot February 2026. ~2.5–3 weeks total, including post, to hit the Oscars air date.
3-week set build in Cape Town, after a materials-test phase in London.
5 shoot days — 3.5 studio, 1.5 location.
Only VFX: the cursor arrow (CG in a couple of fast/wide shots only), some set extensions, miniature comps. Everything else practical.
Hudson: "I don't know how you slide the slider from CG to real, but I do know how you slide the slider from real pretending to be CG to real."
Pre-Production: The Materials Test
Production designer Luke Moran-Morris built 3–4 small test sets in London — one painted/scenic, others printed and intentionally pixelated.
Early costume/mask prototypes went on the lead actor inside these test flats to check the look on camera.
Two goals: nail the technique, and get agency/client comfortable before the spend. Hudson: "It was a little bit of a leap into unknown territory... great to show off some tests and say, hey, look, this is going to work, isn't it?"
Guiding rule for every department: take a real surface's detail — face, sign, shop window — print it flat and slightly down-resed.
Wardrobe, Masks, and Sets — Faking Digital by Hand
Suits: built like a "video game designer's" idea of tailoring — shoulders and seams deliberately off, per costume designer Amina Kara Calendar. Lapels/buttons/tie printed flat onto the jacket (effectively smocks with no relief). Only the shirt underneath is a real garment.
Masks: cast from actors' own faces, reprinted, worn back over their heads — faked the "texture-mapped" low-res look with no digital face work.
Sets: printed, not painted; pixelation calibrated to camera distance so it only reads right from the isometric angle.
Colour reference: The Getaway (PS2-era GTA-style game, grey London) — oddly colourful desaturation (purples/oranges/reds inside the greys) shaped the grade.
Lighting: DP Ben Fordesman lit two full studio streets flat/shadow-free — a softbox across ~90–100m, requiring custom-fabricated 30x30m silks (nothing off-the-shelf was big enough).
The arrow: 4 pieces of yellow perspex glued together, 3 LEDs at the corners — perspex glows along the seams like fibre-optic. Puppeteered on a stick for anything interactive; CG only for a couple of fast wide shots.
The Camera Work — Isometric Rig and the "Reality Run"
Isometric angle chosen deliberately over the more common "follow-behind GTA" look seen in online NPC content — harder to execute, less familiar.
Camera held ~9–10m in the air for most of the film via a giraffe crane on a flatbed truck, driven by a precision driver rehearsing the character's stops/starts. Light stabilizing added in post.
No drones — Hudson: "Do you want to be flying your drone up for two minutes... every single time you want to have a look at your shot?"
Repeatable truck line = de facto motion control (no pan/tilt/parallax), letting separate passes — background pedestrians, falling coins, cleanup — get composited together.
Centrepiece shot, "the reality run": one continuous take, locked isometric → sinks/zooms → handheld. First idea (a giant ramp off a vehicle) was ruled out — the set was 75m, nearly wall-to-wall, no room for a large vehicle to stop.
Solution: a custom wire-cam rig with an operator riding it (normally these run stabilized/unmanned). Main challenge was maximizing starting height against the rig's own hardware; took days to get smooth.
The game-to-reality cut works better landing on the character's face/body motion amid foreground chaos than on a "clean" wipe across a column, as originally assumed.
Miniatures and Other Practical Tricks
4 miniature environments expand the world — full-size actors composited into miniature plazas for 3 mid-film shots.
One flips it: a boardroom where actors/table are full-scale but the whole room is miniature — new combination for Hudson. A visible seam on a printed-skyline window was left in on purpose: "Imperfection... is what brings humanity to a thing."
On the "anti-AI" read viewers gave the spot: not the original intent, Hudson says, but he's glad it landed that way — "If AI is making our reality, this is like the humans making computer reality."
Choreographer Maeva Berthelot built an NPC movement vocabulary from studying game animation cycles — unnatural arm swings, mechanical head turns, background NPCs idling into walls.
Team researched the existing online "NPC impersonation" genre for reference, then pushed for something with its own character.
Lead actor trained at École Jacques Lecoq in Paris — a physical theatre school Hudson likes casting from. His arc: an almost imperceptible shift from robotic to organic movement across the full 60 seconds.
Crew and Credits (Film Craft Grand Prix, Cannes Lions 2026)
Agency: Isle of Any — Founders Toby Treyer-Evans, Laurie Howell; Creative Director Ben Brown; Design Director Mel Reichert; EP Mateus DeFaria
Production: MJZ — Director Oscar Hudson; DP Ben Fordesman; Production Designer Luke Moran-Morris; EP Molly Griffin; Producers Archie Johnston Steward, Andrea Harvey; 1st AD Ty Hack; Choreographer Maeva Berthelot; Costume Designer Amina Kara Calendar
Production Service (Cape Town): Gatehouse Commercials — EP Bev Wynne
Post/VFX: Ethos Studio (Colourist Dante Pasquinelli); Selected Works (CD Greg Spencer, EP Alex Fitzgerald)
Editorial: CARTEL — Editor Leo Scott, Assistant Editor Beau Hogan, EP Evyn Bruce
Music/Sound: Wave Studios NY — ECD Aaron Reynolds, EP Vicky Ferraro
Worth stealing: building the set before designs were fully signed off (scale → rough shape → surface finish, in stages) is the same compressed-approval crunch we deal with on tight broadcast deadlines. Scout-first-then-build-to-match is a solid alternative to designing blind and hoping a location turns up. And "no drones for a shot that needs constant re-checks while dressing a set" is a good rule of thumb for tracking-shot conversations.
