The new commercial for Honda Odyssey lives up to the vehicle’s name, taking viewers on an unexpected ride with the iconography of a time when people knew to “Respect the Van.” Created by design/production company Nylon, the spot uses visual wizardry (literally) to brand one of the leading minivans in the category.
“We wanted to create an ode to an era when the van was a symbol of cool and marry it to the apex product in the field, the Honda Minivan,” says RPA Art Director Tatum Cardillo. “The spot straddles the fine line of between homage and hilarious as we enter the world of ultimate van art: the airbrushed Nordic Viking God against the thumping track of Heart’s hit song Barracuda.”
“This was an incredibly exciting project for many reasons including the fact that so many kinds of techniques were involved including live action, animation, and visual effects,” says Nylon Creative Director Bryan Lee. “We really got to exercise our creative muscle and on a theatrical spot at that.”
Nylon directed both the live action and animation which included a never before seen technique to capture the airbrush aesthetic complete with its signature fuzzy line quality.
“The concept is truly inspiring,” adds Creative Director Jason Cook, “and we embraced the challenge of developing the look and execution of the airbrush come to life working hand-in-hand with the animation team at Titmouse. This effect runs counter to typical direction because most van art is created by non-trained artists and, thus, it had to look rough hewn and great all at the same time.”
The actual “effect” of the airbrush was created all in After effects with heavy heavy compositing. Both the 3D rendered environments were created in (3DS MAX and Maya). The Cel animated characters were built up with layers and layers of subtle blurs, diffusion, and noise. Airbrush art usually doesn’t have any sharp edges or lines so the team had to build everything in passes and layer them on top of each other to achieve the desired aesthetic and effect. This was apparently the most time consuming part of the process as the images really had to look like airbrush art that had come to life, so all the details needed to be considered and handled appropriately.
The whole project took about two and a half months to complete. The team started with style frames and story boards, then did a 3D prev vis/animatic so they could lock timings and block the shots out. Once that was approved by the agency the team started rendering things out half res. When they had a cut that was approved at half res they rendered everything out full res at HD size for the final.
In a project like this Audio plays a vital role, in this spot the Audio was roughed in early on in the process. The team at Soundeluxe gave several options at the beginning of the project and then as the team started putting the audio into the 3d animatic They accessed how the audio “vibed with the picture and rhythm of the spot”. Through the rest of the process the animation team would send the audio team the most recent edits and Sounddeluxe would score to them as they went along.
I am studying grapic design. Today in my lesson my teacher showed us this advertisement and told us how ugly and bad it was. I was the only one in the class who liked the idea of this advertisement and everybody laughed at me when I said that this advertisement was the most conspiciable clip of the 50 spots we saw and that I thought the idea was good. So what, I still don’t understand how people can be so intolerant against cool new ideas. I wrote in my blog (german) about this spot today, too 😀