ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.03 - JUNE 2000

100% Digital Cars Are Up To Speed
(continued from page 2)

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."

"Each creative guy has his own feeling," Barba explains. "Most of them, because they've been in the business for a while and have been shooting cars for a while, prefer to shoot cars with a camera and lens, the old-fashioned way. They feel they get what they want. The digital thing is kind of new to a lot of them, and they don't really warm up to it until you show them repeatedly that you can make a digital car look every bit as photo-real as you can with a real car. And then after a while, they warm up to it, especially when you compare the expense involved in shooting a car on a motion-controlled stage with multiple passes versus doing it digitally."
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