The Honda Civic has a reputation as a dependable, affordable and fuel-efficient car. Perhaps you may have turned to it when you bought your first automobile, or maybe you are considering it for your next car as the price of gasoline skyrockets.
For 2006, Honda has redesigned the Civic, and with the change, comes a stunning spot from visual effects and design company A52, Los Angeles, and agency Rubin Postaer and Associates (RPA), Santa Monica. The :30 “Keyhole” explores rebirth–the rebirth of a car set against rebirth in nature.
The first moments of the commercial transport the viewer through the keyhole in a car door. The world we encounter is just waking up. A cocoon hangs from a tree branch, a snake slithers along the ground and a Honda Civic moves through a dry, mountainous landscape as the first light of dawn illuminates the sky. The butterfly emerges, the snake sheds its skin and newborn spiders pour out into the scene. Their webs are likened to roads on the navigational system in the car’s dashboard. As the car proceeds into a cityscape, the sun grows brighter.
THE GROUND FLOOR
The team at RPA brought A52 onboard at the beginning of the project. The A52 team, which functioned as a directorial collective, includes Patrick Murphy, visual effects supervisor/lead Inferno artist; Andy Hall, visual effects supervisor; and Angus Wall, editor at sister company Rock Paper Scissors, Los Angeles.
To the A52 team, agency creatives presented loosely concepted boards with images tied to the start of a day, like toast popping out of a toaster. After briefly viewing the boards, A52 executive producer Mark Tobin said the agency told them to disregard the images–they were simply to focus on the idea of rebirth, which was set forth as the premise of the spot. The agency did note, however, that it wanted to include the keyhole element. “It was more like collaboration with the agency and all of our people,” explains Tobin. “There was minimal live action so it kind of made sense for us to [direct] it rather than hire a car guy to go to go shoot a bunch of car plates and then give it to us and then we just implement their vision. We got to do the whole thing and it made much more sense for this project, because it was so visual effects intensive.”
Though Murphy and Hall have directed in the past, this was the first time they worked together. “It was hard at times but it was great,” says Murphy. “Even though we’re always enthusiastic about other jobs, I think this one in particular brought the whole company together and everybody had a say on how it should look and what way it should go. It was nice that we all were going in the same direction, and I think we all got what we wanted out of it as an end result.”
Regarding the approach to “Keyhole,” Hall explains that it avoided the sometimes fractured nature of commercialmaking. “The continuity is there from beginning to end because we’re seeing it from the first steps until delivery,” he relates, “and also having the control as to what the client wants in terms of the finished product.”
Though they functioned as a directing collective on the spot, Hall, Wall and Murphy, have no plans to continue actively pursuing directorial endeavors. But, if the proper project arose, Tobin said he would be open to it. “So many times, even on visual effects intensive jobs with a director involved, we almost become co-directors anyway,” he notes, “because there’s so much that they ask for our input on–creatively and technically–that you become sort of a partner with them.”
As an editor, one would imagine Wall taking the reigns of this project toward its end, but that wasn’t the case. Tobin said that in many ways Wall led the group and was an integral component on the team from the start.
NEW FRONTIERS
Without a script, Murphy, Hall and Wall helped develop the creative concepts behind the spot. After a couple of weeks of back-and-forth with RPA, the team began to pre-visualize the approved treatment. Wall suggested using David Hockney’s photocollage Pearblossom Highway for inspiration. The artwork shows a desert road and the street signs that surround it. Layers of photographs distort the overall scene. The setting in the spot is similar. The live action was filmed over the course of two days at the Pisgah Crater near Barstow, Calif., a cinder cone left by a volcano.
Murphy says that every shot with a Hockney-feel was shot on location as live action. Then he took each shot and split it into different pictures–sometime up to 120 different images–and then rebuilt the image like a collage. Next he would track the live-action footage and apply it to all of the pictures so he would get the same sense of dimension and movement as the live-action piece. As each scenario changed, the amount of pictures he could include changed. Depending on whether the shot was wide, tight or mid-ground, he would make adjustments to ensure all of the shots felt like they existed in the same world. The spot is about 80 percent CGI and compositing, and 20 percent live action.
Hall explains that Hockney’s art also inspired them to set up three digital still cameras while shooting the live action sequences. They took more than 20,000 photographs, which they used to recreate the environments and map onto 3-D textures to render on off-kilter image of the world in which the car moves.
One challenge the project presented was creating the time of day–pre-dawn transitioning into dawn. “To try to build a whole lighting scenario for every shot that would depict that progression in time was kind of tricky,” says Murphy.
For the 3-D elements the team used Maya for all of the animation and Mental Ray for rendering the color and lighting. Some of the compositing was done in Shake. For the 2-D elements, everything was based on Discreet Inferno and Flame. Then the spot was delivered in high definition.
