The 2004 Mitsubishi Endeavor is one fortunate sport utility vehicle. It’s been captured on a 30-second piece of film that combines equal parts Martin Scorsese and the Wachowski brothers. The new spot, "Street Level," brings to mind the famous Goodfellas restaurant shot buffeted by a techno beat and permeated by a mood of Matrix-esque urbane hipness.
In the Deutsch LA-created ad, we follow the Endeavor through a city street (and a city building) in a stylized, multi-speed, single shot directed by Jason Smith of Bob Industries, Venice, Calif., and DPed by Adrian Wilde, with visual effects work by Santa Monica-based Method.
The spot opens on a hand pouring sugar into a cup of coffee. Immediately, the driving beat of the Swedish group Overseer’s track "Horndog" begins to push the spot along. The camera moves over the coffee cup to reveal a shot of a security guard sitting at his desk, staring out a glass wall with a view on the street outside.
Driving along the street is a Mitsubishi Endeavor, which the security guard recognizes with a nod of his head, as if in appreciation. This whole time, the camera is moving through the security guard’s room at the same speed as the car is driving past the window.
The camera moves through the wall of the office, revealing some interstitial building circuitry, and soon we’re on the other side of the wall and in a deli, where the automobile is still turning heads. The camera moves through the store as the customers’ stares follow it in fascination.
Moving through the building’s wall-bound circuitry, we find ourselves in a gym next, where several kick boxers gaze out the window at the passing Endeavor. The gym is the last room in the building, and the camera passes outside to a street corner where it locks back onto the car, which is now turning a corner.
We zoom into the car’s interior, where three very attractive young professionals are grooving to the music track—laid back, but with someplace to go. The camera passes through the car, turns so that it’s focused on the top, and then proceeds to levitate up through the chasm between the buildings, until a dazzling nighttime cityscape is revealed.
At this point, several graphics appear, one after another: "Endeavor is here. Under $26,000. Are you ready?"
The final graphic reads, "Mitsubishi. Wake Up and Drive."
COMPLEX SHOOT
And POST
Smith called "Street Level," the most complex shoot he’s ever been a part of. "I was involved with a lot of serious effects jobs back when I was with [now defunct] Propaganda," said Smith, "but this is definitely the most challenging piece of technical work I’ve ever been [in charge of]."
"Street Level," along with its yet-to-air companion spot "Second Level," required eight days of shooting and nearly three months of postproduction work. (Two :15 lifts, "Remember" and "Stealth," were also gleaned from the project.)
As Smith remembers, the original concept from Deutsch involved various groups of people within a building turning their heads to notice the new Mitsubishi. "What I brought to the party," related Smith, "was the idea to make it all happen in one shot—which presented some huge technical challenges of course."
All told, the shoot required four days on location in Sydney and at Fox Studios Australia, Sydney, according to Smith. The nature of the motion control camera dictated a lengthy schedule during which he and his associates would spend "upwards of two to three hours just programming the motion control."
According to Method VFX supervisor/Inferno artist Alex Frisch, the first major technical decision he and Smith made was to shoot the spot’s foreground and background on different plates. "There was no location in Sydney that would quite work for us to do both foreground and background, so we shot the foreground onstage at a studio in Sydney with a motion control camera over a blue screen," related Frisch, who was present for the shoot. "Then we used the same motion control camera in the Sydney streets to shoot the background plates with the car and everything else. This created the problem on stage of ‘where should the actors look,’ so we made a rabbit to fill in for the car and give the actors the right eye line."
"Once we found our street in Sydney, we measured the street and measured the set, and they had to be inch-perfect so that the foreground would match the background," Smith noted. Both the director and Frisch admitted to a high degree of collaboration to ensure that all the live-action shots would track properly with the compositing process.
It’s also worth noting that much of the crew on the spot were Sydney-based personnel with recent experience on the last two Matrix films, as well as both The Lord of the Rings features.
Filmed last year during the week before Christmas, "Street Level" necessitated shutting down a busy Sydney street for four nights leading up to the holiday, which, "was quite an adventure," remembered Smith.
According to Frisch and Method CG supervisor/3-D artist Gil Baron, the most challenging aspect of the ad was the last sequence—where the camera enters the vehicle, turns so that it’s focused on the top of the car, and then proceeds to launch up to a panoramic view of the Sydney skyline.
"Originally, that was going to be a helicopter shot," noted Baron, "but it soon became a apparent that it wasn’t going to work, so we suggested to approach it differently—as a 3-D shot. We wanted to think about the shot not as a zoom, but as a three-dimensional move, so we ran around Sydney and took pictures of a street that would be our starting point, and a point at the top of the Sydney Tower that would be our end point. Then we did a pretty detailed photo survey of all points in between."
Working from that foundation, Baron and his team labored to complete a convincing 3-D shot that doesn’t disrupt the smooth, one-take feel of the spot.
This seems like a great deal of trouble for a :30 automotive commercial, but Steve Skibba, VP/associate creative director/ copywriter for Deutsch, stressed that the process never felt overdone or out of control. "It was some pretty ambitious filmmaking, but all in service of the idea," Skibba asserted. "It was the most efficient way to look at [different groups of people], and observe their reactions to the new Endeavor.
"There were so many things you had to be concerned with on this type of production that don’t come up with a more conventional piece of film," Skibba continued. "It was very much like a mathematical equation. So many variables had to line up precisely just right, and when you adjusted one thing, it set off a chain reaction that affected so many other parts. You had to be mindful of all the variables that were operating simultaneously. We were lucky to be able to trust Bob [Industries] and Method to really deliver with their technical expertise and artistry."
