By Carolyn Giardina

SHOOT sought out visual effects artists to share insights into the making of vehicular spot fare as reflected in some recent noteworthy endeavors. The body of work’s range is far reaching–from the time-honored classic art of Japanese origami to a rendition of weather seasons over many years. Add into the mix an inventive Rubik’s Cube-type approach, as well as a surreal depiction of a “Scissor-Tree Forest” in which people’s heads are replaced by assorted objects. Here’s our rundown:

THE ART OF “ORIGAMI”    A new ad for the Mitsubishi Endeavor successfully combines today’s digital technology with the classic art of Japanese origami, and in turn continues Mitsubishi’s “Driven to Thrill” campaign that celebrates its Japanese heritage.
    Entitled “Origami,” the unique blend of arts tells the story of a Ryu–a mythical creature that transcends land, water and air–following the Endeavor through an all-terrain maze of origami imagery until the SUV reaches its destination. It ends with the Ryu bowing in respect to the Endeavor’s capabilities. The story is told through the images, and also through voiceover in Japanese with English subtitles.
    Victor Garcia of bicoastal/international MJZ directed the commercial for BBDO West, Los Angeles; the spot features digital effects and compositing by Venice, Calif.-based Sight Effects.
    “Our approach was combining the mediums, not to go with an all CG approach,” explains Sight Effects’ Melissa Davies, who served as visual effects supervisor on the job with Adrian Hurley. “The goal really was to make it look like a photoreal environment–and we felt it would look more real starting with a real base.”
    A team of origami artists led by artist Robert Lang created real origami elements. Some were shot as individual elements with a motion control camera on a bluescreen stage at Hollywood’s Sunset Gower Studios; others were used as reference to create CG models of the art. The Endeavor was shot on location in Los Angeles. Curtis Clark, ASC served as DP, and lensed the live action in 35mm film.
    “We shot the car first, and then matched the direction of the lighting on set with the origami,” Davies says. “Then we animated [the elements] and lit them so they would match each scene–The whole goal was to make everything look like it was folded paper–every element except for the car.”
    Ryu, for example, was designed and folded by the artist; but in the spot, the character is entirely CG. “We didn’t want him to be too fluid,” Davies relates. “We wanted him to be an origami element that would have a little bit of a natural motion, so we intentionally made his movement stiff.
    “It was a lot of experimentation about how the elements would act–how would water act as paper,” she continues. “We envision water to be really fluid. We had to do a lot of experimentation with different frame rates and making it stutter so it felt like waves.”
    Some shots combined many elements. For instance, a shot of the Endeavor passing through a wheat field including a paper background with separate paper elements including clouds, telephone poles and the road; these were combined with CG elements such as the wheat. Images in other shots included origami trees and buildings.
    Placing the Endeavor into these environments involved adding proper reflections onto the car. Time was a critical factor throughout production; Davies explains that the cycle was three weeks from awarding to completion.
    The Sight Effects credits include: Joana Cruz, lead visual effects artist; Miles Essmiller and Gavin Miljkovich, visual effects artists; Kim Dail and Jason Mortimer, senior animators; Shun Imaizumi, Jon Jenkins and Robin Scher, animators; and Andrea Morland, visual effects producer. The company did models and animation using Maya, and rendered in Mental Ray. Compositing was completed in Discreet Inferno.
    Tom Muldoon of Nomad Editorial, Santa Monica, edited the spot. Stefan Sonnenfeld of Santa Monica-based Company 3 was the commercial’s colorist.

A TUNDRA FOR ALL SEASONS    West Hollywood-based visual effects and design company A52 and director Olivier “Twist” Gondry of bicoastal/international Partizan recent completed a :30 that may appear straightforward but was actually quite complex.
    “Throw It In The Tundra,” created by Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles for Toyota, presents a single shot of a Toyota Tundra parked outdoors, as two men load its bed with bales of hay, tools and other supplies. The men begin their work in short sleeves on a sunny day, but the weather quickly turns rainy, and their attire instantly changes to rain gear. While the men continue working, their clothes change rapidly through a range of seasons and weather conditions. During the course of the spot, the camera moves around the truck and to a final hero shot of the vehicle. Throughout, the voiceover states: “The loads you haul can be mean, dirty, gritty; sometimes, cold-cutting steel.  So you’d better have a truck that’s strong enough to take it.  That truck is the Toyota Tundra. Load after load, mile after mile, year after year, Tundra endures. Toyota, moving forward.”
    The spot was lensed on location in Los Angeles with a motion control camera that Gondry programmed to give the shoot natural camera movement. The actors were directed to replicate their movements and the timing of their performance for each take. For different shots, they were also to load different objects and in different weather conditions that were lensed in camera. “I wanted to give it a natural look, so we had to change the weather,” Gondry says. “We shot rain, snow, and nice weather.”
    Next, the director–who established himself as a respected CG and visual effects artist, after many years of working with his brother, acclaimed director Michel Gondry–used a morphing algorithm that he wrote himself to make a subtle, smooth transition from take to take, showing the changing of seasons and the passage of time.
    The application of the morph, he acknowledges, has shifted over the years; it took off as a hero effect, although, Gondry uses it as a seamless one. “Morphing brings a smoothness to an effect,” he says, describing the technique as a type of dissolve. “[This job] would have been tough without morphing.”
    Gondry created the morph sequences himself and provided the work for A52’s lead visual effects artist Tim Bird, who worked with Flame artists Alicia Aguilera, Justin Blaustein, Mike Bliss, Eric Bruno, Ben Looram and Ryan Yoshimoto to seamlessly blend those elements into the master camera move.
    “It was very collaborative,” Bird says of working with Gondry. “Morphing shifts things, so we needed to work on the details to integrate the morph into the job.”
    In addition to the technical challenge, there were many creative tasks required to make the spot work. A52’s visual effects team created a wide variety of atmosphere and weather elements. They handled sky replacements, and added clouds, dust, rain, as well as 2D and 3D snow, to appropriate segments. The team also incorporated a digital matte painting created in Adobe Photoshop by artist Helen Maier into all winter segments.
    “The intention was to show seasons over a series of years, rather than just four seasons,” Bird relates. “We did about 15 seasons in total, and tried not to repeat any of the them.”
    Partizan’s team included executive producer Sheila Stepanek, DP John Zilles and line producer Valerie Romer. A52’s executive producer is Mark Tobin, and Scott Boyajan and Dan Brimer co-produced the project for A52.
    Mike Hackett of Santa Monica-based Crush Edit cut the spot. End graphics were provided by Solid, Santa Monica.

SMITH & FOULKES GET SURREAL In “heads”    London-based Nexus Productions’ directing duo Smith & Foulkes (Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes)–the team behind the acclaimed Honda “Grrr” ad that dominated last year’s advertising awards season–has completed “Heads”, a surreal Renault Megane spot that successfully combines live action and animation. This entertaining commercial–a co-production of Nexus and The Lift in Madrid–was created by Publicis Lado, Madrid.
    The spot–featuring a live action Renault in a fully animated world–dramatizes life in a remote village nestled in the dangerous “Scissor Tree Forest,” where all the folk have lost their heads. An animated Spanish Formula one hero Fernando Alonso first drives through the village, observing that each of the residents’ heads are replaced with assorted odds objects such a toaster, telephone, a boot, a watermelon and a fan. Alonso then enters and successfully navigates through the dark forest in his Renault Megane–with the scissor trees in hot pursuit. The spot ends with a shot of the latest victim of the forest, fitting a bird’s nest atop his body.
    “We had to design an environment that would fit the story; the car was the starting point,” explains Foulkes of the team’s goals. He further relates that they went for a “weird, spooky feel” that allowed them to have fun revealing the strange heads without venturing too far into horror film territory.
    A key challenge was to tell an intricate story in a very short time frame (a :30 and :45 were created). “Every shot had a purpose to move the story; there wasn’t any time to linger on any of the shots,” relates Foulkes. “We had to establish the car, we had to establish the village, we had to establish the forest; and we had to [create the ending].”
    The team was on a tight production schedule–two months from prepro to delivery–that started by creating a 3D animatic. The live action shots of the Renault Megane were lensed on a test track in Madrid, with Denis Crossan serving as director of photography. “We had already done a 3D animatic, so we knew what shots we needed and the angles,” Foulkes explains, adding that it was essential to replicate the animatic exactly during the shoot, including action, camera positions, distance and speed.
    The next challenge was to integrate the live action car in the animated world. Back at Nexus’ London headquarters, the footage of the vehicle was placed in the 3D environment, created primarily with Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s 3ds max.
    The directing duo explains that another important task was the process of creating the fully textured world for the car to travel through and then a reflection of that world to sit on the car, to replace the tarmac test track. A variety of techniques were deployed to believably marry car and road, including using particle animation to throw up dust and rocks. Mist was added to complete some of the shots. Lighting also needed to be matched; for instance, the team had to darken the car when it enters the forest.
    Attention to detail also included the use of the car’s headlights to dramatically light up the roadside.
    Composting was accomplished in Discreet Flame systems.
    Nexus credits include Darren Price and Ben Cowell, heads of 3D; Reece Millidge, head of animation; and Mike Skrgatic, Sheldon Gardner and Reece Millidge, Flame artists.
    Tom Harding at London-based VTR handled color correction.
    The spot was produced by Julia Parfitt (Nexus), and Alvaro Weber and Gabriel Jorges (The Lift).

TAKING THE RAV 4 FOR a cubic spin    The Mill’s London headquarters (the company also maintains a facility in New York) has created a clever “spinning cube” effect–resembling a sort of Rubik’s Cube–for the new Toyota Rav 4 commercial titled “It’s Whatever You Want It To Be.” Directed by Paul Street of London’s Streetlight Films for Toronto-based Dentsu Canada, the spot focuses on a Toyota Rav 4 driving through different environments and as the cube spins, the viewer sees half of the car morphing into a more suitable vehicle depending on the terrain. Throughout the spot the Toyota becomes half tank, half London bus, half truck and half rally car.
    Lead Flame artists Wes, Rich Roberts and Giles Cheetham created the transition between the two different types of vehicle. The agency wanted to create a cube that was organic in its movement and overall design, and that blended the action of the vehicles seamlessly.
    It was important to Street that the cube itself didn’t feel like a post effect – he wanted to create the impression that the images were being projected onto a physical object, explains producer Austen Humphries of The Mill.
    So to develop the proper execution, The Mill’s Flame team, guided by Humphries, began by spending five days testing various moves and spins on the cube. They also focused on the texturing of the cube and played with lighting effects.
    The live action was lensed on location in Los Angeles. To get the needed footage, Humphries explains that the production team used a rig attached to a camera car and tracking marks. Both vehicles used in each shot were lensed in the same place, and the camera was locked so that the backgrounds were the same.
    The live action images and an animated cube were sent to editor Tony McGrath of Streetlight Films, who cut the spot and did a rough comp.
    Post was then accomplished by the aforementioned Wes, Roberts and Cheetham, as well as Flame assistant Dave Birkhill.
    The assignment was compositing intensive. The team had built a rough cube in 2D, which could be animated to spin left or right. With the elements in place, each had to appear as a single image. The work started with retiming the spinning cube at different rates in order to end with the proper shots. The team resized the cars so that the two halves were a better fit, but that meant that the backgrounds no longer matched. So the team replaced a number of backgrounds in the shots.
    To enhance the effect, Humphries explains that the team added snow in some images, as well as included a variety of atmospheric elements to make the scenes match. “These were subtle things that tricked [the viewer] into believing the two shots were matched up,” he relates.
    To complete the look, Mill colorist Seamus O’Kane made sure the lighting as well as the time of day matched in each completed image.
    Since the agency was based in Canada and Street in Los Angeles, The Mill’s BEAM.TV was used to facilitate postproduction. Humphries explains that each evening the team at the Mill posted versions of the commercial onto BEAM.TV, and they held a conference call with those in Toronto and Los Angeles. The team addressed the comments overnight to create a smooth workflow.

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