The innovative international television program, "In The Qube," features virtual walls instead of real ones.

Mantra Design is creative content design and visual effects boutique. Recently, they were asked to build virtual walls, using its breakthrough 3D graphic environment, for the set of a new television show, In the Qube, airing on international channels including Sony’s Animax. Mantra’s achievement in bringing to life this cutting-edge project is underscored by its ability to do it under the extremely tight time constraints of a weekly series.

In the Qube takes viewers around the world to explore the hottest trends in pop culture, including movies, video games, music, sports, and the people who are defining what’s new and exciting for today’s youth. To create a presentation as cool as the content itself, Embassy Row, a New York City-based global format digital production company handling the project, turned to Mantra Design.

The concept behind the television show was to place hosts Maria Sansone and Tom Hatton within an actual 3D environment (“the Qube”), but instead of building expensive physical sets for filming, a virtual set was created digitally by Mantra. To reflect the show’s avantgarde topics, the supporting visuals needed to be equally hip and edgy, as well as redesigned each week to keep them fresh.

“Embassy Row needed a cost-effective approach to continually providing new sets for In the Qube and asked if we could do it digitally,” says Mantra’s Anna Toonk, producer for the project. “So we conceived, designed, and built a virtual set. Then we developed a workable pipeline to bring in original content for each episode.”

Embassy Row and Mantra partnered to create the design for the shows, with Embassy Row providing footage and general guidance to Mantra artists Chris McCard and Aaron Kent. The two then render the content in Adobe After Effects and Maxon Cinema 4D to create the high-energy, high-impact images that paint the digital set.

Adding to the challenge of the sheer volume of work involved is the time pressure of delivering it for a weekly show. “We’ve provided as much as 11 minutes of content for a 22-minute episode, turning it around in four days,” says Toonk. “The way our artists are using our render farm and sharing files is completely new. It’s that innovative approach to structuring the workflow that enables us to do it.”

Embassy Row’s Stephanie Masarsky, co-executive producer of the project said, “When we were presented with the challenge of how to make this show feel highend and bigger than anything of its kind, we knew that collaborating with Mantra was the only way this would be possible.”