Chickadee | Custom 3D Looping Environment for Virtual Production Music Video

Our virtual production studio, AVRO XR, recently hosted JUNO Award-nominated artist Boy Golden and BNB Studios director Julio César Assis to film a visualizer for an unreleased track from Boy Golden's upcoming album, Best of Our Possible Lives. The concept was simple: a continuous one-shot of Boy Golden driving through an endless desert landscape. 

Our CoPilotXR team created a 3D looping desert background and provided virtual production supervision on a production day at AVRO, giving the Boy Golden & BNB Studios teams complete creative control over the environment without the traditional constraints of on-location shoots, weather dependencies, or daylight limitations.

The BNB Studios team needed a convincing desert environment that could support a one-shot visualizer format. This presented several technical and creative challenges:

Tight Timeline: The CoPilotXR team had just three days to design, build, and render a photo-realistic desert environment from scratch. 

Seamless Looping: The background needed to loop endlessly without visible seams or resets, allowing the crew to shoot continuously and easily reset for another take. 

Realistic Parallax: Convincing parallax was essential to selling the illusion of actually driving through a landscape. Foreground elements needed to whip by quickly while distant mountains moved slowly, replicating how the human eye naturally perceives depth and distance.

Rendering Optimization: Our initial environment designs included detailed desert foliage and textures, but to maintain smooth 8K rendering, we simplified and stripped back some of the foliage elements.

Our team designed, optimized, and delivered a beautiful desert environment for use in AVRO XR Studio, complete with: 

8K resolution rendering optimized for seamless LED wall playback

Endless loop functionality for uninterrupted shooting

Realistic parallax with motion-blurred foreground elements and slow-moving distant landscapes

Optimized textures and lighting that balanced visual quality with rendering performance

We also provided the virtual production supervision on-set at AVRO, ensuring the entire shoot went smoothly. Thanks to the perfect lighting, endless desert, and lack of logistical headaches (like weather or location permits) that virtual production provides, the Boy Golden & BNB Studios team wrapped filming in just a couple hours, showing that this workflow opens up new creative possibilities for music artists and directors working within tight timelines and real-world budgets.