For the newest ANY ROAD spot to promote the launch of the 2006 Lexus IS sport sedan, A52 was asked to "winterize" it from beginning to end.
"We have a long history of relying on A52 for complex visual feats," explained Jack Epsteen, exec producer with ad agency Team One, "and in this case, we felt that tapping into the company's artistic expertise to add snow effects to this spot would be an interesting way to back-up the 'Why live in one dimension' tagline. They met the challenge in their typical exemplary style."
A52's team, led by visual effects supervisor Pat Murphy, CGI supervisor Andrew Hall and producer Scott Boyajan, faced several important challenges in fulfilling the agency's request. First, many of the scenes in Hal Honigsberg's original edit used playback effects, where the scenes were sped-up to 3X. So, A52's team had to make their effects work in realtime for almost 80 seconds of footage that, when sped-up and cut back in, played back in about 26 seconds.
Second, as Murphy explained, "In the original version, you have this beautifully color-corrected car from the transfer that's on a dark black road, and it looks fantastic. When we put the car into a white environment, where it needed to have white reflected into it, we really had to work hard to put the car in that environment but still make it look good."
All of A52's work was performed in HD resolution, and that includes a digital matte painting created in Photoshop by artist Helen Maier, who used real photography to build a one-frame digital matte painting to be used as the spot's new background environment. "Our goal was to make it feel as if the snow was a couple of days old, that the sun had been shining and the snow had compacted," Murphy explained. "Some of the trees might not have snow on them because of the leaves being lighter, wind blowing it off or the sun having melted it down." Maier's multilayered matte included trees, ditches and birms, as well as a new road plate with snow and car tracks on it.
Meanwhile, Flame artist Ben Looram matted out everything except the driving Lexus from the footage used in the original edit. The CGI team then used a scan of the Lexus and created an animated sequence in Maya duplicating the precise movements of the car from the original edit, allowing them to reproduce the camera tracking data they lacked, due to not being involved in director François Vogel's original, Prague-based live-action production. That CGI "template" helped the CGI team track Maier's new road plate, to ensure it matched the vehicle's movement from the original edit. That gave Murphy a new, snow-covered road plate that moved in perfect sync with the Lexus.
Having determined what tires were on the vehicle in the live-action footage, Hall's team built four new tires for the car, tracked those wheels to the car, built a layer of CGI snow to fill the treads and passed that layer along to Murphy. The CGI team was also responsible for creating the snow that flies from the passing car. "Because the agency wanted to get a sense of this car cutting through these environments," Hall said, "we had some artistic say in how the snow was generated and the way it kicked off. For that reason, it was probably a bit more dramatic than it would have been if it had been shot that way in reality." A52's CGI team, incidentally, uses mental ray for rendering.
With the new environment tracked, the wheels of the car interacting with the snow and snow particles coming off the wheels, Murphy used Inferno to improve the way the vehicle and the snow spray stood-out from the background. How? "By tweaking the grade, color-correcting and exploring until we found the right look," he summarized. "We also made the snow spray coming off the tires a little bit lighter in color than the snow on the ground."
Murphy adds: "The spot looks in many ways like a pure mirror effect, but we wanted it to feel like the shots with and without snow were not exact duplicates. So, we did little things like change the sky slightly and turn the car's logos around so they always read properly."
A52's team also included exec producer Mark Tobin and CGI artists Dan Gutierrez, Christopher Janney, Branden Perlow and Max Ulichney.
Established in 1997 as a home for the very latest high-end photoreal visual effects technologies and some of the industry's most innovative and talented graphic design artists, West Hollywood-based visual effects and design company A52 (www.A52.com) creates award-winning imagery for visually ambitious commercial and television projects.
The company's work has been earned AICP Show recognition for six consecutive years along with recent "Outstanding Commercial" Emmy, Andy, BDA, Belding, Clio, British Design and Art Direction, International Monitor, International Automotive Advertising, London International Advertising, One Show and PROMAX awards.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
