Case study · Old Navy (direct)
The previz file that ran the windows.
Five Herald Square windows, Unreal Engine, automated day/night cycles, and live models sharing the glass with digital characters — all driven by the same file that approved the cut.
The challenge
Turn Old Navy's Herald Square flagship into a live mixed-reality canvas: digital characters sharing five windows with real models, in one of the highest-footfall retail corridors in America. The illusion collapses if a single sightline, parallax cue, or eyeline is wrong — and there is no post-production pass on a storefront.
The PREVIZ approach
Most of the job lived in PREVIZ: the window worlds were designed, blocked and approved as motion against a measured model of the Herald Square façade. AIM then prepared the final delivery files for Unreal Engine — the system powering the windows — with dedicated daytime and nighttime clips, so the storefront swaps its light with the street's. Continuity between the on-screen world and the physical one was locked in previz, because the street would expose any frame that wasn't.
Outcomes
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Windows, one real-time canvas
Unreal Engine scenes authored in PREVIZ, wired into the storefront display stack.
3
Transparency windows, live models behind glass
On-screen characters keyed so people on the street read as part of the scene.
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Light cycles, zero operators
Sunrise and dusk swaps ran automatically — no operator intervention.
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File from approval to playback
Qualitative — the previz that approved the cut is the system that drove the windows.
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No second take on a storefront
A shoot can fix things in post. A live retail façade cannot. Every angle, parallax cue, and eyeline had to be correct at the moment of switch-on — which is why the entire installation was blocked in PREVIZ against a measured model of the actual façade before a single scene was exported.
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Sharing the glass
Three windows ran a transparency layer: the digital character composited against a keyed background so the live model behind the glass read as part of the same scene. That trick is pure continuity discipline — the on-screen blocking has to respect real-world sightlines exactly, and previz is where exactness is cheap.
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Previz past the edit, into operations
The system was time-of-day aware: the daytime film at sunrise, the nighttime film at dusk, no operator required. It is the cleanest example of the PREVIZ thesis extended to its logical end — the same file that approved the cut also ran the windows, live, in Manhattan.
From the file
“There is no post on a storefront. The windows worked because the file that ran them had already been walked, in motion, a thousand times.”
— AIM · Herald Square production notes
The work
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AIM PREVIZ
Bring PREVIZ to your next production.
Sign off on motion, not moodboards. Blocking, look-dev, and continuity locked before a single frame is shot.