In a mediascape jammed with car advertising, what makes a spot stand out? One way an ad—and the vehicle it’s selling—can rise above the clutter is to use visual effects to create groundbreaking imagery sure to capture the viewer’s eye.
Visual effects have played a major role in car commercials for years, but lately several striking spots that use photo-real effects have graced the airwaves. Some of the ads feature otherworldly environments; others employ effects to subtly alter filmed reality.
Acura’s "Dance," directed by Mark Romanek of bicoastal Anonymous Content, via Rubin Postaer and Associates, Santa Monica, was created almost entirely with CG. Digital Domain, Venice, Calif., concocted the spot’s spooky, science fiction-flavored world—including the cars—with computers, not cameras. In the ad, an Acura speeds around an alien-looking landscape. The car multiplies, then becomes a single car again. Each time the number of Acuras increases, it appears as though the cars are dancing.
"Everything begins in pre-visualization at Digital Domain," states Ed Ulbrich, senior VP, production/executive producer for commercials and music videos at the shop. "Digital Domain is very much a digital production company. There’s no such thing as postproduction, at least in the work that we do."
Ulbrich compares the pre-visualization phase of the project to the shooting period of a traditional job. "Pre-vis is effectively the shoot on this spot," he says. "Even though we’re not going to be shooting anything, we’re going to work that way—we talk in traditional filmmaking terms, and we work with a pre-vis artist who is effectively a DP."
Prior to "Dance," Digital Domain had spent a year and a half working on the feature The Day After Tomorrow. "We developed some pretty remarkable proprietary software applications that dealt with fluid simulation and water simulation," says Ulbrich. "We had shown this work and a number of other tools to Mark [Romanek], and Mark decided he wanted to create this wet, dreary, drippy world, so he came up with the look and the feel and the color palette."
Ulbrich says that achieving the detail in "Dance" was "mind numbingly complex. Had we not done [The Day After Tomorrow] and developed that software tool, that nature of work would have been impossible on a commercial schedule," he notes. "It’s one thing to do CG cars, it’s quite another thing to have a CG car that’s wet driving through a CG road with gravel, dust, rocks and spray."
Making It Real
"Synchronized XUVs" for General Motors Corporation (GMC), out of Lowe, New York, and directed by the team Big TV!—Andy Delaney and Monty Whitebloom—who are with harvest, Santa Monica, features a formation of GMC Envoys. Actions that demonstrate the cars’ various features are performed by a group of men who open and close the vehicles’ doors and hatches with military precision.
"The GMC job was one of those jobs where people look at it and go, ‘What effects?’—which to me is the supreme compliment," says Rick Wagonheim, partner/senior executive producer at rhinofx, New York, who worked on the ad.
The Envoys were created in CG for a simple reason: lack of product. "There were not enough cars available for the shoot, so we had to clone and composite, cut mattes and rebuild that scene," explains Wagonheim. "On one level, it’s fairly rudimentary. On another level, it’s not so rudimentary because it has to be invisible and seamless. It has to feel like a pure live-action job."
Cadillac’s "Magic," directed by Nick Piper of Backyard Productions, Venice, Calif., via chemistri, Troy, Mich., is another spot that called for invisible, or photo-real, visual effects. The ad shows a series of Cadillacs moving through different settings during various seasons and times of day. At one point, a town literally lights up as a Cadillac passes through it.
"It was primarily a 2-D compositing Inferno job with CG support," reveals Wagonheim, who points out that the seasonal and time-of-day shifts were created with visual effects. "We were creating elements that would allow us to bridge shots. We also did a lot of digital landscape reconstruction."
Effects helped achieve a realistic look for "Music Video," a spot out of Euro RSCG Worldwide, New York. Introducing the redesigned Volvo S40, the ad, directed by Dave Meyers of bicoastal/international @radical. media, looks like a clip that happens to feature a Volvo. "Music Video" used a combination of digital stills and live-action footage shot from locked-off camera positions to create what appeared to be moving shots. Jonathan Keeton, co-owner/creative director at Radium, Los Angeles and San Francisco, oversaw a team of artisans who made the shots look as though they were lensed while the car was in motion.
Discussing car commercial effects through the years, Wagonheim says, "The difference between the car effects of yesterday and today [is that] yesterday’s effects were fairly obvious. Today you can’t see the eye candy, but they couldn’t have done that job if it wasn’t for the support of visual effects."
Telling A Story
While visual effects in car spots are often invisible to the viewer, effects are sometimes deployed to add an element of fantasy to an ad. Infiniti’s "Blurry Man," directed by Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ) via TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, is a case in point. The ad features a man who has bonded with his car, as demonstrated by both the man and the car having semi-transparent motion blur trails coming off of them. The ad’s tag line: "The feeling stays with you."
"The idea is that this performance-oriented car has saturated him," says Paul Hahn, visual effects producer at Method, Santa Monica, who created the commercial’s visual effects. "We did two weeks of testing and some pre-vis whereby we did a whole range of looks for this motion blur. We did both 2-D and 3-D design motion blur and we presented all the tests to the agency and the director and refined the look before we shot any of the elements."
Alex Frisch, lead visual effects artist/visual effects supervisor at Method, thinks that rendering techniques of computer-generated images have improved recently. "It’s to a point now that we can effectively produce photo-real images in a very convincing fashion," he says. "That’s something that is definitely better today than it was a year ago or two years ago."
A52, Los Angeles, crafted visual effects for Cadillac’s "Turbulence," directed by Nic Mathieu of Anonymous out of chemistri. In the visually striking spot, four cars burst into an imaginary pocket of water from four different directions. As each car speeds along, a jet stream of water trails off of the vehicles.
"The trickiest part was getting the turbulence to work with each individual car," says Patrick Murphy, visual effects supervisor/Inferno artist on the spot. Additionally, a live-action shoot presented the challenge of getting the individual lighting for each car just right. Back at A52’s offices, modeled cars were tracked onto the filmed cars. "Then the CGI would generate wave distortions that would come off of [each] car," notes Murphy.
2-D elements depicting spray and glisten were also integrated into the imagery. "Once you do CGI, it’s always good to do that extra step to make it even more believable," says Murphy. "Adding real photography of water helps to sell it." Finally, the cars, the desert environment, and the skies above the scene were tweaked with 2-D tools.
A desert locale also served as the backdrop for Mercedes-Benz’s "Clouds," directed by Nicolai Fuglsig of MJZ through Campbell Doyle Dye, London. The ad depicts a car speeding through the desert as it tries to avoid two cloud-gods battling in the skies overhead.
"[It was an] epic job for the London office," says Alistair Thompson, executive producer of The Mill, London and New York, who created the spots effects. "It was a very tricky spot for everyone to deal with because it was shot on location in a desert, but there were very [few] clouds in the footage to work with."
Thompson reports that artists from The Mill snapped 20,000 digital still photographs of clouds, some of which ended up in the ad’s heavily layered imagery—"Clouds" has shots that have as many as one hundred layers of composited material.
The CG team in London had to experiment for months before the shoot to create the look of the cloud-gods. "[The gods] had to have a similar photo-realistic feel [next] to the actual clouds we were comping in," explains Thompson. "They had to feel like they were individuals characters, as well. Trying to get that right was quite a delicate balancing act."
Even with technological advancements, Thompson thinks that creating believable visual effects is still challenging. "Technology gets better and you have more flexibility," he says. "But essentially what you need to do to make something photo-realistic is still the same. You still have to do an awful lot of preparation and you still rely on having the correct elements to work with."
Zoic Studios, Los Angeles, actually created a CG robot out of Mini Cooper parts for its "Men of Metal" campaign out of Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Miami. The car campaign appeared on the Web, in print ads and on billboards. The project tells the tale of a fictional scientist who creates a robot that assists drivers in need.
"Essentially what we were asked to do was to take a Mini Cooper and, from an engineering standpoint, redesign it to function as a bipedal robot," says Zoic creative director/director Loni Peristere. "Not only did we have to evoke the car, it had to use every single piece that’s in the car. We had to put pieces together in a logical way so that the robotics engineers would buy into it."
Early on, Peristere and others went over the car’s engineering book and broke everything down. Robotics engineer Ron Kubat joined the team and everybody went to work. "Over several weeks, we basically ‘Frankensteined’ the Mini Cooper," remarks Peristere. "When we were done, we had a skinless Mini Cooper and all the trim to put on it. We used our design skills to make the robot look sexy, just like you would dress up a car."
Zoic photographed the elements and built a texture library. After senior modeler Jose Perez worked on each part individually and put together the CG robot model in Lightwave, the parts were textured. Peristere, whose company’s recent car work includes Kia and Cadillac jobs, thinks the first 80 percent of visual effects works is easier than it used to be, but adds, "What is always very difficult and time consuming is the dynamics that are required in the animation of the vehicle to be believable on the road."P
