What it had to solve
The spot for US healthcare provider Village Medical needed an ambitious surreal world — rails, conveyors and a crowd of physicians — captured with a realistic, in-camera approach.
The idea
A fully procedural factory where hundreds of hanging doctors ride a dynamic rail system — each one different, 'somewhere between Kafka and Pixar'.
How it works
Artjail built a procedural Houdini setup that generates hundreds of non-repeating hanging doctors from simple curves, rendering only what the camera sees to cut render time. On-set wire work and a pre-viz roadmap guided the shoot; references ran from 1936 car assembly lines and airport luggage belts to Monsters Inc. and Tati's Playtime.
What it did
No results reported; the piece shipped an impossible crowd that looks hand-built, with no visible shortcuts.
Background
For a Village Medical spot directed by Patrick Daughters through Anonymous Content for Deutsch NY, VFX boutique Artjail built an atmosphere 'somewhere between Kafka and Pixar': a healthcare factory where doctors hang and travel along a dynamic rail system.
JD Yepes, partner and VFX lead at Artjail, said the research phase covered 1936 car assembly lines, airport luggage conveyor belts, distribution centres and Amazon warehouses — but the pivotal references were Monsters Inc. and Jacques Tati's Playtime. To build the rail system flexibly, Artjail's artists created a procedural setup in Houdini that could generate the whole system from simple curves, along with hundreds of hanging doctors, giving 'hundreds of combinations' without any repeating patterns.
The environment was built from camera angles, so the renderer only calculated what was visible — a big cut in render time. Pre-viz served as 'a critical roadmap', letting the crew know exactly which scenes and elements to capture on set, where wire work carried the practical half of the illusion.
Why it lands
The crowd is the hero: hundreds of hanging doctors with no repeating patterns, generated procedurally from simple curves.
Research is showable in the frame: assembly lines, luggage belts and warehouses filtered through Monsters Inc. and Tati's Playtime.
Pre-viz as an on-set roadmap eliminated guesswork on a shoot heavy with wire work.
What you can take
Procedural craft — Houdini curves, camera-only rendering — is what lets a surreal idea ship on a spot budget without visible shortcuts.
Since then
The spot was delivered in 2023 for Village Medical via Deutsch NY. No campaign results were reported.
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