Press release from MPC:
When the biggest day in advertising arrived on Sunday with Super Bowl XLVI, millions saw a pair of Hyundai spots featuring VFX by MPC [1]. Chief among the studio's efforts is a fully photorealistic cheetah racing a Veloster sports car.
Cheetah, a collaborative effort between MPC, Innocean and Rattling Stick Director Daniel Kleinman, opens as a Veloster and a caged cheetah square off at the starting line of a desert airstrip. The race begins in a whirl of squealing tires and roaring as the big cat's handler flings the cage door open. It takes only a second for the world's fastest land animal to realize he's in an unwinnable race and turn his aggression on his handler.
MPC created the photoreal cheetah by photographing a real specimen on set and capturing high-dynamic-range pictures of the lighting conditions, then combining both of those elements in Furtility, the studio's in-house fur-and-hair tool. To test the efficacy of their project, the studio produced an image with three cheetahs and asked in-house artists and producers to identify the real one. On all but one case, they missed.
"Creature work is difficult at best, but creating an animal that really exists and is in the preceding shot is particularly demanding," noted MPC LA Managing Director Andrew Bell. "Our in-house experts had to do just that in Cheetah. Between Furtility and fur gurus such as Dominic Edwards, producing this spot was not only possible, but pleasurable."
MPC also handled clean-up work on the vehicle and environment in a spot promoting Hyundai's Genesis Coupe R-Spec. When a distinguished business executive seems to pass on in the passenger seat just before revealing the one-word secret of success to his young driver, the quick-thinking man jolts the oldster back to life with a series of powerful braking maneuvers.
Links:
[1] http://www.moving-picture.com/