Ripple’s “It’s Happening” is a thirty-second brand film about the adoption of blockchain by banks and financial markets. Its edit moves through offices, payments, city landmarks and monumental clocks using match cuts and time-lapse. Stock footage covered part of the sequence, but some situations and transitions did not exist with the framing or movement we needed.

At Framestore, we combined stock photography and video with generated material, compositing and animated typography. The generated shots had to fit the movement and rhythm of the existing footage.

My main sequence linked six monumental clocks in different cities. Their hands needed to travel through almost a full rotation while matching from one clock to the next. A 3D layout established the movement and provided a reference for each shot. We used either motion transfer or direct generation depending on the result, then arranged the shots around the strongest transitions.

The generated clock faces lacked detail and introduced artefacts. We tracked them again and rebuilt them in compositing using the original 3D rotation. For two shots, targeted video outpainting extended the frame without regenerating the whole image.

I took the six clock shots from image creation through video generation and final compositing. I also made the New York time-lapse with the Ripple billboard, generated worker imagery for the fast montage, and created the shot of two office workers shaking hands. The film was delivered in three languages as part of an international campaign.