G-Star RAW — Pommel Horse Champion

The Project

In 2024, G-Star RAW set out to make an Olympics film with a gymnast and a pommel horse. The film was directed by Felix Brady and produced by Stink Films, and Biohazard VFX came on board to supervise and deliver the visual effects: shot in one day, serviced for five weeks, finalized after six months of refinement. This is the project that best reflects how we work — we will always see it through.

G-Star RAW ‘Pommel Horse Champion’ — agency Longstoryshort, edited by Church Edit, color by Harbor Picture Co., starring Olympic gymnast Rhys McClenaghan. The campaign was recognized in Craft at the ADCN Awards 2025, and written about by WWD and G-Star themselves.

The Multiverse

The film follows Rhys as he enters a flow state and transcends dimensions through his craft. We built six distinct worlds for him to travel through: the backrooms, a brutalist headquarters, an overpass, a subway platform, and red city — before his ultimate test in the Leap environment, where a fall leaves him poised hundreds of feet above the ground. The pommel horse, the spine of the film, extends from its standard length to over 20 feet. Rhys pulls himself up, takes a leap of faith into darkness, and lands back in the backrooms to finish his routine clean.

G-Star RAW Pommel Horse Champion campaign poster

The Backrooms

The most frequently used location was the Backrooms — an extended version of the on-set build, with a concrete floor and a ceiling that stretches off into a black abyss. The on-set practical lighting array was rebuilt as a custom procedural lighting rig in the drop ceiling, designed to replicate the fixtures the film crew actually shot under.

The environment was treated as a character. It was rigged with our procedural lighting framework and animated per shot, with reactive flicker matched to the intensity of Rhys’s performance. By the end of the project the Backrooms had taken on a life of its own.

Finished widescreen frame of Rhys performing in the Backrooms — Finished frame — Backrooms

Shot breakdown animation of the Backrooms environment build and composite — Shot breakdown 01

Behind-the-scenes photo of the practical Backrooms set build — Set build

Work-in-progress render of the digital Backrooms environment extension — Environment WIP

The Matchcut Worlds

Four environments carry the matchcut sequence as Rhys travels between dimensions:

Headquarters — brutalist design inspired by G-Star’s actual Amsterdam HQ: concrete, glass, and metal.
Overpass — a hand-modeled town square wrapped in overpasses, sunlight cutting between the structures.
Platform — an underground subway station lit by a soft orange glow from the skylights above. This environment never stopped iterating — revisions continued up to two weeks before delivery.
Red City — a blue-hour cityscape built with procedural building generation tools and stock assets, Rhys on a rooftop bathed in red against the blue sky.

Every one of these went through the full stack: rotoscoping, keying, matchmove, cleanup, 3D environment and digital set design, and 2D compositing.

The Leap

The Leap is an expansive, procedurally generated cityscape spanning 2 miles by 4 miles, surrounded on all sides by a CG ocean, built on OSM data from New York City and Chicago. Rhys’s pommel horse instantly relocates to a rooftop there, replacing a steel beam on a building under construction.

The environment demanded a new rendering and denoising pipeline: a custom Intel Open Image Denoise compilation paired with a procedural motion vector setup in Nuke. Each shot incorporates over 10,000 unique light objects rendered into 20 distinct light AOVs. Rendering the full sequence on Fox Renderfarm’s dual RTX 4090 nodes consumed nearly three months of machine time.

Panorama of the green screen set for The Leap sequence — Green screen set

Finished widescreen frame of Rhys on the pommel horse above The Leap cityscape — Finished frame — The Leap

Shot breakdown animation of The Leap cityscape build and composite — Shot breakdown 02

The Leap environment render in progress — Render 01

Digital Doubles and Garments

The director’s cut called for full CG shots with close-up garment detail. We built the CG garments from scratch using the actual patterns supplied by G-Star, and created a digital double of Rhys, hand-animated to match his routine — including two 3D animated inserts shot from a body-mounted camera POV. These assets gave Felix entire shots to work into his edit that didn’t exist on the day.

The CG garments in the Backrooms — Garments in the Backrooms

Work-in-progress on the CG garments built from G-Star's actual patterns — CG garments WIP

Roto, Revolution, and a Model Trained in Production

We leveraged machine learning directly in the Nuke compositing pipeline. To expedite prep, our roto team only rotoed the middle frames of each shot, leaving the handles untouched. The rotoed frames trained our in-house roto model, which filled in the rest.

Then the 2024 revolution in Bangladesh disrupted our prep team’s internet access — they were sending roto files as lines of code over text message. Because the model existed, we kept working straight through the downtime. No delays.

Wireframe view of the digital double's hands in close-up — Wireframe — close-up hands

Finished widescreen frame of the close-up on Rhys's hands — Finished frame — close-up

By the Numbers

6,000 frames rendered
60 shots delivered
15 terabytes of storage
3 months of render time on dual RTX 4090 nodes
One government overthrown by revolutionaries mid-production

Making Of

The full-length behind the scenes.

MAKING OF

Credits

Client

Client: G-Star
CMO: Gwenda van Vliet
Senior Global Brand Manager: Yasemin Görgeç
Head Stylist: Alexander Gabriel

Agency Longstoryshort

Creatives: Joris Kuijpers and Tamara Pruis
Producers: Vanessa Janssen and Fione van Wijk

A Stink Films Production

Executive Producer: Blake Powell
Producers: Maddy Perkins and Shea Coleman
Directed by: Felix Brady
Director of Photography: David Foulkes
Athlete: Rhys McClenaghan
Photographer: Rob Rusling

Edited by Church Edit

Executive Producer: Laurenn Reed
Post Producer: Kylie DeVries
Editor: Mah Ferraz
Next Gen Editor: Arie Abraham
Edit Assistant: Logan Tarter

Visual Effects by Biohazard VFX

VFX Supervisor & Lead Artist: Nicholai Vogel
Post Producer: Daniel Pianezza
Executive Producer: Davané
Head of Production: Parth Gupta
VFX Editorial: Xander Pasley
Conform: Nicholai Vogel
Compositing Lead: Mikaiel Russ
CG Lead: Nicholai Vogel
Prep Lead: Tanvir Hossain
Compositors:
- Wing Sau Yip
- Anurag Raj
- Parth Gupta
- Nicholai Vogel
- Ben Morse
- Ryan Game
- Steele Turner
Environments & Props:
- Miguel Fernandes
- Jason Probst
- Fiftyrock
- Daichi Sakane
- Nicholai Vogel
Rotoscopy:
- Imran Sarker
- Anamul Kabir
- Nobir Hossain
- Sakil Ahmed
- Jahid Mia
- Sarikul Islam
- Jannati Aktar
- Abdur Razzak
- Golam Ajam
- Nazmul Hossain Rana
- Suzan Kabir
- Fauzia Rahman
- Sabina Yasmin
- Mouli Bathula
- Venu Gopal Kattaboyina
- Maruthy Prasad
- Sai Chand Nandeti
Matchmove:
- Santosh Dash
- Debasis Sahu
- Amol More
- Roshan Khairnar
- Sudhakar Asampelli

Additional Visual Effects by Twin22status

Post Producer: Tony Twin
3D Modeler: Dmitriy Lisafin

Colour by Harbor Picture Co.

Colourist: Alex Gregory
Colour Assistant: Adam Mears
Colour Producer: Charlie Morris

Director’s Cut

Music & Additional SFX: Yaaqov
Sound Design: Studio Cardinal Paris
Postproduction Versioning: Biohazard VFX

Agency Edit

Colour: Crabsalad and Laurens Orij
Postproduction Versioning: The Compound
Soundtrack: Ambassadors Berlin and Rachel Tauwnaar
Foley: Public Audio

Special Thanks

Fox Renderfarm
Tom Luf
Z

Watch the work