Spoon-bending psychics and runaway refrigerator magnets aren’t typically the stuff that car commercials are made of. But then again, nothing is typical about the newly launched, visual effects-intensive campaign for the redesigned Toyota Camry from Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Torrance, Calif.
Saatchi & Saatchi called on two directors to helm the spots in the package: feature filmmaker Bryan Singer, who helms ads out of bicoastal/international Propaganda Independent, and Phil Joanou of bicoastal Villains. The four eclectic spots utilize clever, state-of-the-art imaging to show the familiar automotive name in a fashionable new light. "The Camry’s a great car, but it’s always had kind of an oatmeal image," observes Steve Rabosky, chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi. "With the redesign, it’s a totally different car from what it was before. We felt like we needed to go to great lengths to make it feel more contemporary, more youthful."
That, as it turned out, entailed visual effects. "We didn’t set out to do a bunch of special effects spots," notes Rabosky, "but the ones that seemed to me to be the most entertaining had that property to them."
Rabosky recalls that the Joanou-helmed commercials, "Launch" and "Psychic," "set the mood for the campaign." Early in the process, Joanou and the agency called on Sight Effects, Venice, Calif., to handle visual effects. "We got a call from Phil and the production company, just after they’d received the agency storyboards," says Alan Barnett, visual effects supervisor, who co-founded Sight Effects with executive producer/visual effects supervisor Melissa Davies and chief engineer Rudy Hassen in 1989. "That’s usually when we get involved, because there is a fair amount of input we can give as far as how to approach things, how to design the shots so that they work in terms of time, budget and aesthetics."
Barnett had worked with Joanou before—most notably on Computer Associates’ "Wake Up," out of Young and Rubicam, New York, which earned Sight Effects an honor in the visual effects category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show this year. "Phil is collaborative, but he has a very firm vision," Barnett relates. "It makes it easier for us, because he knows what he wants and is able to communicate it."
For "Psychic"—in which a telekinetically gifted man bends and levitates various objects in a scientist’s office to form a floating facsimile of a Camry—Joanou and the team at Sight Effects worked to make the concept of flying objects a reality. "When [‘Psychic’] first started out, it was just elements in the room, flying around," Barnett recalls. "Phil evolved it into this idea of the elements joining together and starting to form the car itself."
At the beginning of the shoot, Barnett and company planned to film the moving objects, which included several clocks, a spoon and a credenza, on a greenscreen and composite them into the live action. Although some elements were done with greenscreen, most of the final shots were created with CGI. "As we discussed camera position and camera movement, we started to realize we would end up using mostly 3-D for the ad," Barnett says. "The stuff we shot on greenscreen really became more for reference.
"For instance, the credenza," he continues. "It’s a big object, and what Phil wanted was for the elements to sort of float while they were moving. We figured out a way to shoot it, but it was more cumbersome than we thought. It became easier to get the kind of movement and positioning that we wanted by creating [the credenza] in CGI."
Like most of Sight Effects’ CGI, the objects in "Psychic" were created on Silicon Graphics’ Maya software and composited via Discreet Logic’s Inferno. And, while Barnett, who was on-set for one day—Melissa Davies was on set for the second day of the two-day shoot—says it was a "complicated process," it wasn’t a long one. The shoot lasted about four days—two days on a stage and two days on location getting the practical automotive footage—and the project took six supervisors and artists two-and-a-half weeks from start to finish.
"Launch" depicts various monitors—from TV sets to stadium screens to blimps—around the world, flickering to reveal the new Camry and the phrase "You want it." Barnett supervised postproduction on that ad, and visual effects supervisor Adrian Hurley was on-set. The spot was shot in several locations around the world. Some of the effects the firm worked on included a CG blimp.
Sight Effects spent a great deal of time on a scene in "Launch" for a sequence involving soccer fans who see the Camry on a Rome stadium screen in the midst of a rainstorm. "For the lightning, Phil used xenon lights to light up people and spaces, and overexposed the film so we could utilize the flashes. So, that really was a compositing job. The more interesting challenge was the rain. Once you start putting people in [in post], you’re stepping on the rain and you have to recreate it. The trick was to make it look like the backlit rain that was shot in Rome. Since CG rain tends not to look like it’s backlit and sheeting, we combined a bunch of elements—rain and mist and a lot of different pieces to match the live stuff."
Ring of Fire Studios, West Hollywood, which was founded five years ago by partner/executive producer John Myers and creative directors Jerry Spivack and the late Mark Zarate, was tapped to provide effects for the whimsical, Singer-directed spots, "Magnets" and "Rhythmic Drive."
Like Sight Effects, Ring of Fire was involved on the spots from the start. "We had phone conversations with Bryan Singer, the agency and the editorial company," says Myers. ("Magnets" and "Rhythmic Drive" were cut by Livio Sanchez of The Whitehouse, Santa Monica; Paul Norling of FilmCore, Santa Monica, edited "Launch" and "Psychic.") "We make a big effort, early on in these projects, to get as many creative minds as we can to come up with the best possibilities. We always know there are going to be changes. But if you’ve established dialogue between all the key creative personnel, then at least everybody is on the same page."
"Magnets" features two AWOL refrigerator magnets, a football player and a hula girl, who stow away on various metal objects until they reach their final destination, a moving Camry. Though the spot seems tailor-made for CGI, Singer did not want to use it at first. "Bryan’s general approach was to get as much as he possibly could in-camera with real magnets," Myers reports. "They made the magnets, and they had puppeteers wrangle them through the various shots, with rods and wires and things like that. Our general response was, ‘Get what you can get, knowing that there’s going to be certain logistical limitations [to using only the puppets].’ "
One such limitation was an outdoor shot in which a magnet leaps from a scooter to the Camry. "It jumps up about thirty feet in the air, and lands on the car," explains Myers, who, like the team at Sight Effects, has worked on Toyota spots for Saatchi & Saatchi in the past. "To do that with puppeteers would have been a major undertaking. I don’t know if it would have even been possible, given the time and the resources that we had."
Myers recalls Singer devising the shot during the tech scout: "Bryan said, ‘What would it take to do this?’ And we said, ‘Shoot the plate as you want to see it.’ And, in that specific shot, the magnet will be one-hundred percent CGI." Since the hula girls’ facial expression needed to change throughout the ad, Myers says, "we pretty much replaced her face in every shot. The new faces were generated in CGI in Maya. That’s something we do a lot of. We combine photo-real CGI with elements in a real, filmed environment."
Myers reports that nearly every member of his 26-person staff collaborated on "Magnets" and "Rhythmic Drive," in which cars rotate around a moving Camry as it cruises down a highway. "Everybody from our rotoscope artists and our Macintosh guys to our compositers in Henry and Inferno, and all of our CGI animators worked on the ads."
Spivack, who served as on-set visual effects supervisor on both shoots, went to Akron, Ohio for "Rhythmic Drive." "They shut down a chunk of freeway for him," Myers remembers. "They shot all this running footage of the car with all these cars around it and a real city behind it. It was amazing."
Postproduction on "Rhythmic Drive" was extensive. "We enhanced probably eighty percent of the shots," says Myers, who adds that the most difficult compositing work was "combining passes from a helicopter. Obviously you can’t shoot motion control from a helicopter, but you need precision, and that shot was deep. There were cars on the opposite side of traffic moving in reverse while the cars in the foreground are moving forward. Jerry had to work with the helicopter pilot and Bryan and the agency, and take down data like elevation and air speed and focal distance. Also, the quality of the light changes. You shoot a helicopter pass, and the next time you’re able to do it might be an hour later, so all the shadows are different and the lighting is different. We were down to tracking and compositing individual passes for shadows on cars as well."
The effects were created almost simultaneously for the two spots, in a post process that took about three weeks—preproduction and production took just over three weeks. Myers says, despite the challenges, it all went smoothly. "There’s always going to be challenges and surprises. If you can anticipate them and plan for them, then everything goes fine."
