Classic movie car chases are channelled in ‘Cars’, an LG cellphone spot directed by Filip Engstrom with visual effects by Mass Market. Lead Flame artist Nick Tanner talks to fxguide about bringing a unique miniature and old-school quality to the commercial.
”2010/10/10Jan/cars/enVcars_45_MOL_HD_h264.mp4″”]or click here to watch the piece [16MB]
fxg: I think it’s a really great spot and a really deceptive one. What was your brief from the agency?
Tanner: The concept was that a number of cars were driving to a movie theatre and gradually you’d see references to other films in terms of the choice of vehicles. The key image was the last few shots in the drive-in theatre where the cars are all headed. That was the hook around which the rest of the spot was built. They wanted to have a cinematic feel to the rest of the spot with slight nods to a number of films.
fxg: How did this concept get fleshed out?
Tanner: Originally the cars were going to be more like toy cars, but we suggested that rather than going with a completely CG route that they shoot as much as possible for real. We moved away from the toy car look and created something slightly different by incorporating them into a miniature world. Filip’s line was that he didn’t want it to look like we were in a macro world. We were all imagining fairly early on that one of the ways we could get away with doing this was by having a very short macro depth of field, which is very fashionable at the moment with the tilt-shift references. We assumed we would get away with that, but Filip was adamant that he wanted to have everything really nice and sharp.
It wasn’t so much that the cars were miniature cars in a real-sized world, it was that the cars were real cars in a much bigger world. I thought this was a really interesting and different angle. And I think that’s why it has, as you said, a slightly deceptive feel about it. It’s not obvious what the scale relationships are between the cars and the real world. I think if we’d gone a macro route, it would be easy to pass off as just another macro/tilt-shift spot. The fact that you do have these sharp cars and the long depth of field and sharp background makes for a more interesting and involved image.
fxg: What ended up being shot being shot as live action?
Tanner: Pretty much 90 per cent of it is in-camera. The background plates are a mixture of location shoots. The jungle and ‘lover lane’ shots have background plates that were models built in a studio with various scaled up elements like the mushrooms. Those shots do have CG cars. The rest are all location shot backplates and full-sized cars. We didn’t use any bluescreen or greenscreen. Part of that was the time frame this was shot. Some of the scenes we shot the cars on the same backplate that we shot the background on, but just used a different combination of lenses and framing to get the scale difference. Although, that actually didn’t always work. Some of the shots were just shot against similar enough backgrounds to make it worth having the more natural lighting interaction, rather than having clicked cut out edges from blue or greenscreen.
fxg: One of the key shots seems to be the car breaking through a cup and a cardboard box. Were these full-size props?
Tanner: The polystyrene cup was a practical element shot on set. The location was a facility in Los Angeles which is designed for car shoots with suitable horizons that made it suitable for rotoscoping. The car also goes over a bunch of practical oversized matchsticks. In the jungle shot, the car actually does crash into an oversized orange flower, which was a practical element built on a runway where we were shooting the car plate. So we had a model environment, a 1:1 environment with real plants that we added numerous layers to to make it quite dense and closed. We had a full-scale practical car. We had a model car on the stage that we ran through some of the environments so had interaction with some of the plants. Then we had the full-scale car interacting with the oversized orange flower.
fxg: Knowing that you were going to approach this as a live action, how did you set up the shots in terms of lining up the plates?
Tanner: First, we took some thumbnail sketches that Filip had drawn out, and we did some previs. We were aware that there were some issues in terms of timing and pace, because what had been drawn were a serious of vignettes not yet in the shape of a commercial, so we felt that we needed to get a sense of the flow, and that we needed to be realistic about the number of shots. We also had to do the math on this – if we were doing it in CG, it would be relatively straightforward and you can play around with it, but in live action you have to have everything pretty well lined up and have a good idea about how these shots are constructed. Thankfully everyone was pretty much on board in terms of keeping life easy and going for relatively simple camera moves and relatively static shots.
It was always in my head that this was meant to look like a slightly old-fashioned commercial. I started doing this job at a time when no one really had a CG department. CG was done quite rarely. So we always had to think of things in terms of 2D. I think a sense of a classical narrative or the realism of the camera can be great if you allow yourself to be restricted in terms of what the camera can and can’t do. A lot of effects shots these days end up being broken by seeing the camera do impossible things. In this, we went for the camera being really quite straightforward. We looked at the old classic chase films like Bullitt and The Getaway. You’ve got these really exciting dynamic sequences where the camera is actually doing very little. It’s all in the edit and all in small movements of the camera.
There were some surprises with the amount of dust and debris which came up and caused a few headaches, but by and large everything lined up relatively easily, considering the nature of the illusion we were creating here. There was one shot that didn’t work that well – I think we may have got the lenses slightly wrong – and that was the green car with the lizard in front of the diner. When we put those together as shot, the car just appeared full-size. It wasn’t a technical issue, it was an optical issue. The way the images were composed you didn’t have the same impression of scale that we had achieved elsewhere.
We had a close look at the two plates and realised that whichever lens we had gone with for the car plate was probably a little bit too long, and the backplate a little bit too wide. So if you look at the car plate, which is supposed to make the car appear much smaller, the result was that the car appeared to be the same size and scale in the frame. So we had to go through some extremes in reducing the size of the plate, which we hadn’t had to do for the other shots. Sometimes we adjusted the speed of the plates in relation to each other, where the background’s moving. For example, in the alleyway shots. We also sped up the foreground plates sometimes because that gave it a slightly miniature feel, a slightly unreal feel to their motion.
fxg: Can you break down the polystyrene cup sequence?
Tanner: Everything in those shots – the pair of shots where the cars are approaching the cup and emerging from it – is live action. I think the main challenges we had were the shadows and shadow interaction. We had to find a nice way to deform what was originally a very clean, flat shadow and get it to deform around the surface and the puddle in the lower left hand corner. I ended up using most of the deform options you have in Flame to find a nice way to get it to roll along the ground, to get it to feel like it was attached to the ground and not sliding over it. I tried using Deform and Batch, Flame’s more recent warping module, but that gave the thing a too soft or curved deformation.
I ended up painting a displacement map and projecting a shadow onto a displaced surface in Action. It was kind of a 3D approach, which I think is something Flame handles really well. I followed that up with Sapphire’s Distort to add some more high frequency distortion to it. Then it was just a case of painting a half decent mask all around to get a nice depth of field. That shadow took a surprising amount of time to build.
The second challenge from a compositing point of view was the amount of dust and debris that came out of that cup as the driver came through it. It’s dramatically reduced in the final comp, as it is in all the shots. I’m not sure how much was deliberate and how much was a necessary artifact of the way these props were built. They were very dusty – a number of shots, even the pigeon shot, had a huge amount of dust. We got rid of some of it through grading or tracking patches back on and re-projecting still elements back onto the car to minimise the amount of dust.
Once the elements had been rotoscoped, you could see how much dust we had to bring through from the background plate. Then it was a matter of how you build out the edges of the dust to make a more seamless edge between the plates. That was just a case of loading the dust or smoke elements we had and then tracking them in, so where the dust is rolling off the car as it goes through the cup, you’re hiding that join. You just have to spend the time finding the elements, re-timing the elements and placing them in. When dust or smoke is emanating from a moving object, the source of the dust or smoke has to move with the object creating it, and it has to have its own movement in the air after that. I find that layering a lot of elements on top of each other gives you the control to create that impression. That was probably the second main technical issue with these shots.
In the shot where the cars are approaching the cup, that is a CG hood on the car. We did that to get the decent reflections. The reflection in the hood is the final build of the background plate, with the correct timing and what-not. The car in the hood is the real reflection of the car on the real camera car. We did do a version reflecting the back plate with the car comped in it, but I ended up using the real reflection because that was shot from the point of view of the real car which had a black hood giving very clear and crisp reflections.
There’s also a lot of small camera motions, which lended a lot of verisimilitude. The background plate was reasonably steady. I ended up taking the motion from the car plate in the camera car, allowing the background plate to inherit some small bounces and movements. I think originally I would have anticipated doing it the other way around – stabilising the car plate and trying to track the cars into the background plate. But I tried it that way but then tried to reverse it. The amount of movement that came from the car plate was much more interesting and exciting. The background seemed a little more forgiving. We were very aware that we didn’t have motion control, we didn’t have time to do all the math absolutely accurately with these shots. We wanted to keep the camera pretty low on the cars and see as little interaction between the cars and the ground as possible, because we couldn’t be entirely sure that we’d get perfect line-ups. In the end it was surprising how forgiving these elements were.
We also made some slight adjustments with the cars. There was this idea that they may be toy cars, so we took out some of the detail on the body. If you actually look closely you’ll see that some of the indicator lights on the cop car are painted on, which was a little nod for them to be a toy car. Finally, there were some absolutely killer lens flares that we had to tone down.
fxg: How did you approach the end sequence at the drive-in?
Tanner: The idea is that they are heading to a drive-in and they see the feature presentation on the big screen of the phone. The cars were CG and on the screen we had some flashy animation for the phone. They wanted to give the impression of high resolution and a lot of colours. We had to really develop this as a concept, regardless of the cars and the scale. There had to be standalone feature presentation animation. For the screen we relied heavily on CG particle simulations. We have these thousands of dots in a wave form and ray-traced beams of light. I took some of the beams into Flame and used a camera move to create some of my own beams and particles. People don’t tend to use Flame’s particles much but I love all that stuff. It was quite nice doing all these photographic comps and then take a break from all that and do the motion graphics part.
fxg: Do you have any final thoughts about the spot?
Tanner: I think we could have gone a CG route for this, but I thought at the time, and now, this has an unusal quality that everything in it is real. When the cars burst through the cup or the box, they’re not CG particle bits of dirt or dust – they’re just real and they behave in a way that you can’t really simulate. I really like this spot for that and I think it stands out in 2D because of it. We’re very used to a clean hyper-real feeling in commercials these days, and I think it takes something like this to remember what things really look like when recorded on film. It was very refreshing and pleasing to not get stuck on super-smooth or shiny imagery, to actually have a bit of dust or dirt and odd camera wobble. It gives a really nice texture to the spot and makes it stand out.
Credits
Agency: Young & Rubicam, New York
Chief Creative Officer: Scott Vitrone
Client: LG
Director: Filip Engstrom
Production Company: Smuggler
Executive Producer: Patrick Milling Smith
Executive Producer: Brian Carmody
Producer: Kati Haberstock
Director of Photography: Dariusz Wolski
Visual Effects: Mass Market
Executive Producer: Justin Lane
Producer: Nancy Nina Hwang
Visual Effects Supervisor: Kathy Siegal
Visual Effects Supervisor: Thibault Debaveye
Lead Flame Artist: Nick Tanner
Lead Flame Artist: Jamie Scott
Designer: Lutz Vogel
Editorial Company: Level 2 Edit/General Editorial
Editor: Noah Herzog
Sound Designer: Noah Herzog
Assistant Editor: Matt Toder
Executive Producer: Betsy Beale
Executive Producer: Robert Parker
Producer: Sue Romweber
Telecine: CO3
Colorist: Billy Gabor