Rogue Traders – Stonehenge

Rogue Traders is a prime-time BBC One presenter-led investigative consumer affairs television series starring Matt Allwright an investigative journalist and presenter and his side-kick, 1.93 m (6’4″) Dan Penteado who also works as a private investigator around Europe and the UK. Rogue Traders began in 2001 and is currently on its seventh series run on BBC One.
The pair secretly film unscrupulous door-to-door tradesmen and salesmen using hidden cameras and actors playing the “victim” (often elderly widows) and then use their evidence to confront them at the end of the programme. They usually use an honest tradesman to provide expert knowledge.
Each programme has a theme, this was the first episode of the new series all about dodgy solar power marketing, and the BBC were keen to make a big impact for the first programme. The idea to shoot at Stonehenge arose and at dawn one morning the crew got the necessary footage to create this 3d cgi collapse of the famous stone ring. We first edited the footage and selected suitable texture shots and lighting references. We built the stones to match the real Stonehenge in Maya and gave them a realistic texture before animating them collapsing like dominoes. Matt and Dan had to be rotoscoped out of their original shots in order to interact with our cg stones and the whole sequence was composited, graded and enhanced in Autodesk Discreet Flint.

Client: BBC1