LMNT's spot was built around a simple idea: you lose a ton of salt when you work out, so LMNT puts it back. We see a cyclist dumping salt as she races down the road, along with a handful of other athletes losing salt across different sports. All of it plays out through VFX, particle sims of salt spilling and streaming off people mid-motion.

The hard part wasn't building the sims themselves, it was matching them to the plate. We had to build particle sims in X-Particles at a scale that doesn't come up often, over a million particles per shot, and land them convincingly into the scene scale of the footage. On top of that, everything had to hold together shot to shot: color, particle behavior, sim characteristics, all of it needed to feel like one continuous world even though the shots were split across three artists. We worked alongside Will Bachman and Max Krone, splitting up the VFX shots between us, all three of us doing the same role: sims, compositing, matching the plate.

The shots I'm proudest of are the cyclist dumping salt and a kid hitting a wiffle ball home run with salt streaming off the ball on contact. The particle work on both came out exactly the way we wanted it to.