DMB&B sent an agency team to Los Angeles to work closely with Digital Domain and their in-house director, Ray Giarratana. And the results were very encouraging. "We put every one of our best people on it," Giarratana states, "...and when it was all said and done, the clients got something that really showed off their product well and in a very interesting manner that was different in many ways."

From the very start, Giarratana felt to achieve the creativity demanded in the clients' storyboard the spots would have to be produced digitally. But while creativity may be enhanced using digital effects, what about quality? Besides putting their top people on the spot, to insure a quality equal to live-action, they hired Bill Bennett, a top live-action director of photography for auto commercials, to consult with Ray and Eric and their team. They wanted to be able to match the angles that have proven over the years to show an automobile at its finest.

Blackmobile cruises through "Metal City" at sunset. © General Motors. Images courtesy of Digital Domain (Pontiac).

"I knew this was going to look different from the viewer's perspective because you don't see a desert...or a city completely made out of metal ever," Giarratana explains. "So, one of the things I really set out [to do] from the beginning was to make sure that we photographed the automobile using somewhat established photography. There are angles that look good on a car and have been used before. Lots of very talented [live-action] directors have shot cars before and have come up with a visual language that is beautiful on an automobile. Just because we could move our camera anywhere and in any way without the limitations of a live-action production didn't mean we should."

Being Sensible
Though early on his clients may have thought that with animation you can move the camera anywhere you wanted and go zipping through everything, Giarratana felt otherwise. "It still needs to be beautiful, and there needs to be reasons to motivate moves...I was very much of the opinion that, wherever possible, to try and use the camera in a way that we could almost do [the shot] in live-action. I wanted to stay within some realm of believability from a photography point of view."

While the spots would have been impossible to produce in live-action, they were by no means an easy order even digitally. "In the city spot one of the challenges was the sheer magnitude of information," Giarratana admits. "Just to present a city with that much detail was certainly a challenge. The desert spot, that wasn't quite that big of a deal because it was a lot more sparse and, therefore, not as populated. But they both presented very tough lighting challenges because it's metal on metal on metal, and it needed to look really beautiful and yet realistic as well."

Both spots have been heavily rotated and have received remarkable acclaim. So much so, that when Pontiac wanted to emphasize their solid frame design in this year's ad campaign, DMB&B did not hesitate to go back to Digital Domain. The idea was to keep the original spots running but to pass the Grand Am through an x-ray showing its chassis and edit that in. D2 responded quickly and economically.

A Trend?
Does this mean we can expect to see a lot more digital cars replacing real ones in the future? It depends on the creative team at the agency and the director they select.

"We just finished another spot in the same campaign...and we shot real cars in a CGI environment," states DMB&B's Zapico. "And, the feeling that we're getting is it's even a better looking marriage between a real-looking car and this [digital] environment. So, we'll probably go in that direction next."