As part of the ongoing campaign for Mercury, The Brothers Strause directed another Mercury Sable spot : Synapse. The spot is featured in this week’s fxguidetv.
The amazing campaign combines Swing and Tilt lens with complex keying, complex roto and some cool cutting edge 3D.
The Brothers Strause of tight follow up on their previous efforts for Mercury with “Synapse”, offering a clever, stylized look into the connection between a great idea and great automobile. Shot on a shift and tilt lens in a studio against a white backdrop (not green or blue screen). The spot shows a car being formed from an idea. The visual effects supervisor was Ed Chapman. Chapman, an extremely experienced supervisor, decided to not use green screen as the rack focus during the shots and the issue of reflections would have made removing spill from the plate photography near impossible.
Not only did the Swing and tilt lens provide a beautiful look, it also made the task of tracking extremely difficult, in 3D tracking a zoom is considered one of the more difficult shots to track, as a stable single lens size makes the process of solving a 3D camera track easier. In this case, “the image plane is actually being shifting in a swing and tilt lens – you might actually have a 45mm on one edge of the lens and an 18mm on the other edge of the lens and that is being moved as you rack focus, so …” exclaims Chapman as he compliments the dedicated match moving department of Hydraulx, which used Boujou and complex hand tracking.
To give the actress an edgy movement quality, her actions were timed out and then repeated at a very slow rate and filmed at 6 frames a second. When replayed at correct speed the motion appears normal but slightly stagnated, almost stop motion. “She just moved very very slowly, all the camera moves were very slow, in order to accommodate her motion,… everything takes 4 times longer to shoot”.
In terms of the actual 3D build of the car, the pipeline was Maya 3d composited in Flame. To model the complex car as it builds the company used a partial procedural system, some custom code and in earlier spots such as “Tree”, a Maya plugin ” Xfrog” software was used, with some help from the developers providing a special Maya 8 version to Hydraulx. The team choose to run a multi-pass render approach, using 16bit IFF files between Maya and Flame. “It is not just a single element (between 3d and 2d)…We used such as ambient occulsion, highlight pass, spec pass, … in addition to the beauty pass and they will all get blended or screened in together in Flame; explains Chapman, “and we shot HDRi on set”
Client: Mercury Sable
“Synapse”
Agency: Y & R Team Detroit
Creative Director(s): Lance Paull
Asst. Creative Directors: Jason Henderson, Derek Clark
Art Director: Jason Henderson
Copywriter: Derek Clark
Agency Producer: Linda Larson
Production Company: tight
Director: The Brothers Strause
DP: Daniel Pearl
EP: Jonathon Ker
Producer: Greg Ferguson
Editorial: Cut & Run
Editor: David Checel
Production Company: Tight Films
Exec Producer: Jonathon Ker
Producer: Greg Ferguson
Directors: The Brothers Strause
Post production: Hydraulx
Producer/VFX Supervisor: Ed Chapman
Lead artist:
Mariner: Erik Liles / Jeff Heusser
Sable: Jeff Heusser / Erik Liles
Additional artists:
MB Emigh
Scott McLain
Bill Kunin
3D Lead: Jon Tojek
R&D: Mathew Lamb
Additional:
Mariner: Kirk Cadrette, Del DePiero
Sable: Ken Ibrahim
Tracking: Ryan Lorie
Roto: Gizmo Rivera
Telecine: Company 3/ Santa Monica
Colorist: David Husey
