How do you sell a tower that doesn't exist yet?

You put it in the skyline and fly around it

A developer had a pair of gold twin towers linked by sky bridges on paper, and wanted buyers, investors and the city to see it standing on the Las Vegas skyline before a single foundation was poured

I produced and directed the visualization

Real air, fake building

Here is the deal, a 3D building floating in a 3D city looks like a video game, and people can smell it

So we used real aerial footage of the Strip, the actual resort towers, the actual pyramid, the mountains behind, and matched the 3D towers to the moving camera paths frame by frame

Get the match wrong by a hair and the building slides around like it's on ice. Get it right and the eye just accepts it, the towers belong there

Then the light has to match too. The sun on the gold facade has to come from the same direction as the sun on the real towers next door, and the shadows have to fall the same way, or the whole thing looks pasted on

Every angle, every hour

The camera circles at different heights and times of day, wide establishing shots so you know exactly where it sits, then close passes along the gold facade and the bridges between the towers

Golden hour at the end, because gold buildings were made for that light

Why developers pay for this

A project on paper has to sell units, win approvals and raise money while it's still a drawing

Would you put a deposit on a rendering pinned to a board? most people wouldn't. Would you after you've flown around it at sunset? that's a different conversation

Two minutes of film can do what fifty pages of floor plans can't, make the thing feel real

The same eye as a fashion shoot

Light, angle, reflection, it's the same problem whether it's a gold facade or a gold necklace, the material has to look like what it is

When the producer is the one framing the shot, a wrong reflection or a sun angle that fights the real footage gets fixed right there, not argued about in a review meeting

See more commercial work in the Commercial gallery and my product lighting in the Products Advertising gallery

Built in 3D, sold in the real sky

Length: 2 min 16 s · Producer & director: David Victory, VRSET video production, Los Angeles & Orange County

Key moments

  • 0:00 Towers in the Las Vegas skyline
  • 0:16 Gold facade close-up
  • 0:28 Sky bridge detail
  • 0:50 Close pass along the towers
  • 1:02 Wide view with the Strip landmarks
  • 1:24 Nearby resort towers
  • 1:47 Golden-hour aerial
  • 2:09 Producer credit

See the matching photography in the Commercial gallery.

More videos

The full video library

Also on our YouTube channel.

Planning a video or a fashion shoot? Contact David Victory or call (310) 988-6575 in Los Angeles, (949) 873-4551 in Orange County. Free consultation and quote for first-time clients.