A52 Remixes Lexus Spot

Back in November, in announcing the
launch of its new campaign promoting the launch of the 2006
Lexus IS sport sedan, Los Angeles-based advertising agency
Team One’s executive producer Jack Epsteen said that his
team’s goal was to make each campaign element unique. The
agency hired award-winning director Franà§ois Vogel of
Paranoid Projects: Tool to direct a set of visually
distinctive spots which debuted over the past months. For
the newest spot, the team took Chrome editor Hal
Honigsberg’s finished edit of Vogel’s “Any Road” ‘ showing
the new IS in dramatic running footage filmed in normal
weather conditions ‘ and asked award-winning visual effects
company A52 to “winterize” the spot, from beginning to end.

“We have a long history of relying on A52 for complex
visual feats,” Epsteen began, “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 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 real-time for almost 80 seconds of footage that,
when sped-up and cut back in, played back in about 26
seconds. Secondly, as Pat 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.”

To address these and other important challenges, here’s how
the job was handled, from start to finish.

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 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 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.”

Perfectionists to the end, Murphy described a few other
touches his team added to the finished spot. “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,” he said. “So, we did little
things like change the sky slightly and turn the car’s
logos around so they always read properly.”

Along with Jack Epsteen, the agency’s campaign team also
includes executive creative director Chris Graves, group
creative director/copywriter Jon Pearce and group
creative director/art director James Dalthorp. The team
for Paranoid Projects: Tool included executive producers
Phillip Detchmendy and Claude Letessier, head of
production Amy DeLossa and line producer Kati Haberstock.
Alex Lamarque served as director of photography. Company
3 Santa Monica’s colorist for the project was Stefan
Sonnenfeld. In addition to Hal Honigsberg, Chrome’s
project credits include executive producer Deanne Mehling,
producer Cristina Matracia and assistant editor Tommy
Harden. Honigsberg shared sound design credits with Bob
Gremore, who mixed the spot at Juice in Santa Monica.

A52’s team also included executive producer Mark Tobin
and CGI artists Dan Gutierrez, Christopher Janney,
Branden Perlow and Max Ulichney.