Behind the scenes of award-winning VFX in advertising

Drone shot of the Pepsi Sphere. Photo courtesy of Pepsi.

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Aryan Sachdeva is a Senior FX Artist at The Mill, a leading creative studio known for its visual effects and advertising expertise. The Mill is an award-winning studio that has worked with a wide range of global brands across various industries. Its projects have earned recognition for their impact on the advertising and VFX fields. Clients Mr. Sachdeva has worked with through the studio include several Fortune 500 companies, such as Meta, Amazon, and Apple.

In his role, Sachdeva contributes to the studio’s efforts to stay at the forefront of technological advancements in VFX and advertising, working with major brands to deliver high-quality visual experiences.

From India to Los Angeles

Mr. Sachdeva grew up in India in a middle-class family. He’d long been inspired by the process of creating the visual effects he enjoyed in Hollywood films.

“I was always interested in how these movies were able to bring to life the things that didn’t exist and make them so believable,” Mr. Sachdeva explains.

Every day after school, Mr. Sachdeva attended an institute where he learned to code and model things in 3D using Maya. He originally planned to enter the computer science field and started his academic career in that space. His desire to explore his creative side drew him to VFX. 

In 2017, Mr. Sachdeva arrived in the United States to major in Digital Media: Motion Design at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. His focus was on 3D computer graphics, and he is proficient in Houdini, Maya, Blender, Adobe Suite, and many other programs. While at Otis, he says he fell in love with Motion Design, which inspired him to combine his “knowledge about visual effects with design and tech.” 

Mr. Sachdeva interned at Moving Pictures Company (MPC) in 2021 and was part of the team that worked on the latest Transformers movie, coming full circle with his childhood admiration of film VFX. He recognized after that experience that he far more enjoyed the quick turn-around times in the advertising industry. During his senior year at Otis, he accepted an offer from The Mill to join the FX department and embarked on his career in advertising.

From the Super Bowl to the Sphere

As a Senior FX Artist, Mr. Sachdeva interacts daily with creatives and executives from brands like Apple, Disney, and Meta. It’s his job to take their ideas and develop the concept into a finished ad with his team. He recently worked on 4 Super Bowl commercials in 2025, including the Reese’s Lava Super Bowl commercial and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, Tide x Marvel, and P&G Spruce commercials.

On the Disney Lilo & Stitch Super Bowl spot, which now has 8 million views, Mr. Sachdeva did the groom and fur simulations for Stitch and worked on the cart colliding with the goal post. On Tide x Marvel, which has garnered 5.5 million views, he worked on the dust explosion caused by the impact of Hulk hitting Captain America’s shield. 

Another impressive project he worked on was showcased in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip.

“I have recently worked with the team at Sphere for Pepsi to create visuals that were displayed on the Sphere in Vegas. I excel at real-time and immersive technologies like Unreal Engine, TouchDesigner, and Unity,” says Mr. Sachdeva.

This project aimed to highlight Pepsi Cherry. Mr. Sachdeva developed the cherries falling and confetti simulations using Houdini. “This was in the early days of the Sphere, so a big problem for us was to render these visuals in a format that was compatible with the Sphere’s technology. I got to visit the mini Sphere in Burbank, which is used for quality assurance and testing purposes before the content can be displayed on the actual Sphere in Vegas,” he explains.

Mr. Sachdeva also worked on the “Lays x Goats for Messi” project, which was launched when Lionel Messi joined the Inter Miami Soccer Club in the US. This project was particularly significant for him as he collaborated with the creative team at Frito-Lay and the team representing Messi directly. Mr. Sachdeva was involved in taking the project from the design and concept phase through to delivery, working alongside his team. The project timeline was exceptionally tight, with the team moving from zero to delivery in just eight days. The client’s request was ambitious, requiring 807 CGI goats to form Messi’s face, corresponding to the number of goals Messi had scored then.

In addition, Mr. Sachdeva spent considerable time working on the concept and design of the face with the Creative Director, Matt Fuller. To speed up the ideation process, the team utilized Mid Journey AI to generate potential ideas for how the goats could form Messi’s face. The main challenge was modeling, texturing, and grooming the goats, especially since some of the goats would appear close to the camera, requiring high levels of detail. He worked with a small team in both LA and Bangalore to create several goat variations for distribution.

For a project of this scale, The Mill used a technique called Crowd Simulation, which is often seen in movies like The Lord of the Rings for large-scale army scenes. However, unlike those productions that had years for development, the team had only a few days to achieve the same results. Mr. Sachdeva collaborated with The Mill’s New York office colleagues to establish the crowd simulation, successfully setting up a working model in just two days.

The final hurdle was figuring out how to render the vast number of goats before delivery. The team optimized geometry and render settings as much as possible, but in the end, they rented a large number of cloud rendering machines from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to assist with the rendering process. Mr. Sachdeva recalls this project as an unforgettable experience, highlighting the remarkable achievement of completing such an ambitious task in less than a week.

Mr. Sachdeva’s expertise has been acknowledged by multiple awards and nominations for his work, even at a young age. These include the prestigious Clio Entertainment Gold, Clio Music Bronze, Clio Sport Gold, and Ciclope Bronze. Projects he has worked on have also been nominated and short-listed for British Arrows and Webby Awards.

The Future has arrived

As with many industries, artificial intelligence (AI) is growing in existing VFX systems. Mr. Sachdeva’s work sees him trying to find ways to incorporate AI technology in his work through experimentation for their occasional use.

“I think AI is an incredible tool that will make everyone more efficient and eventually create more jobs than it affects,” says Me. Sachdeva. He also notes that, in the future, there is going to be a greater need for content. “We consume so much more content every day compared to just ten years ago. In the next 10 years, we will probably be consuming even more,” he notes. 

Mr. Sachdeva adds, “We are going to need a lot more artists and people who know how to develop applications and content for these new platforms.” With the advent of technologies like the Meta Orion Glasses or a more compact version of Apple’s Vision Pro, he sees the possibility of being surrounded by content all the time. 

“Now that AI is getting so powerful, I am trying to make sure that I am up to date on all the innovations in the sector,” explains Mr. Sachdeva. He is experimenting with Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI, and open-source large language models (LLMs) like Deepseek R1 and Llama Model by Meta to stay on top of these developments. While not intended for production use, he is also experimenting with AnimateDiff, a model that takes a prompt and converts an image into a video. 

Mr. Sachdeva aspires to one day start his own company specializing in developing immersive experiences for people.