A complex lab where cars auto-assemble, a world where actor Rob Lowe meets Rob Lowe, favorite childhood toys coming to life, hand-to-hand combat scenes with a western Anime-style touch. These are some of the dazzling and fun TV spots that have challenged VFX studios in the past few months. Here's a look at some of the studios, creatives, and techniques behind these standout spots.
THE MILL
If Jaguar's new The Lab commercial seems cinematic in its look and feel, that's because it was shot on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios in the UK. The spot opens on a feature-film scale in a lab, where the brains behind the operation (played by actor Nicholas Hoult) takes viewers, quite literally, into the depths of the innovation lab where Jaguar fuels the great British villains seen in the automaker's 2014 Super Bowl spot starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Mark Strong. After all, behind every cunning plan is a brilliant mind, says Hoult.
The Mill in London (www.themill.com) created VFX for The Lab, delivering four 30-second versions, a 90-second digital film plus online and print stills. Academy Award-winner Tom Hooper of Smuggler London did the directing for agency Spark 44 using two Arri Alexa cameras and three Canon 5Ds to capture the expansive live action.
In one sequence of the spot, Hoult rides in a transparent elevator tube, which magically appears in the empty room of a manor house. It travels down through a huge swimming pool, replete with circling shark, past multiple garage levels to arrive at the cavernous lab space.
Hoult wasn't available for the live-action shoot at Queen's House, a former royal residence in Greenwich, so he was shot greenscreen at Pinewood, while a small crew captured the backgrounds at Greenwich along with a plate spanning the width of the pool.
Once we went underwater, things got a little more tricky, says The Mill's 3D lead artist, Mike Chapman. The initial camera move that was shot on a crane with Nicholas' help was static, so we needed to track this plate and then take the vertical move off the camera and put in onto the lift [elevator]. This was all carried out before we could even think about the background and the shark, which were both full CG.
The heritage garage area that Hoult passes through showcases Jaguars from different eras - even some new ones still under wraps. The space was created fully in CG, starting with our concept team working closely with the 3D team to design and build different variations of the space based on some of the design details we found both in the 007 Stage at Pinewood and in Aldwych tube [subway] station, Chapman explains. Once we had the space built, we tracked Nicholas' action from the greenscreen at Pinewood and comp'd him into the lift.
The central portion of the lab is full of floating CG car parts made from CAD files supplied by Jaguar. Hoult was shot on a cast acrylic platform built on a rig in the center of the 007 stage, which enabled Hooper to keep the background in camera along with reflections on the floor.
Then we added what you would see refracted underneath along with the rest of the glass box, tube tunnels, and floating car parts, says Chapman. Hoult interacts with a few car components, grabbing one in the air and pressing the button on another. As far as the interaction goes, it's a combination of real car parts puppeteered for the close-ups alongside animated 3D parts in the wide shots, he explains. We did have a bunch of the parts on set for reference, so we took a lot of photo reference and did some reference passes on the stage so we could faithfully match the lighting in CG.
One particularly clever shot has a Jaguar's floating aluminum chassis passing right over and through the actor. We rendered a bunch of parts of the chassis separately so we could flicker them on and off in 2D along with 3D rooting Nicholas to get glow for the interaction points back on him, Chapman says.
Autodesk Maya was the main 3D package for modeling, animation, and lighting with The Foundry's Mari and Adobe's Photoshop for texturing. A combination of Pixel Farm's PFTrack and Science-D-Visions' 3DEqualizer were the tracking tools, with Solid Angle's Arnold for rendering. All compositing was done in The Foundry's Nuke and Autodesk's Flame.
We have a proprietary asset management program built into Maya, which was really important for us when managing so many individual elements, like all the cars, notes Chapman. We also have an in-house procedural rendering workflow, which basically means we don't carry any of the heavy CAD geometry in our render scenes and just load these when we need to render. There were no tools specifically written for this project, but we did come up with quite a nice rig for scattering the car parts.
METHOD STUDIOS
Spot watchers are seeing a lot of Rob Lowe these days. In fact, the actor stars opposite himself, playing a bizarre array of Rob Lowes in a DirecTV campaign from Grey New York. Directed by Tom Kuntz of MJZ, the comedy spots depict handsome Rob Lowe enjoying the benefits of DirecTV, while Creepy, Hairy, Painfully Awkward, Less Attractive, and Scrawny Arms Rob Lowe suffers through the indignities of being a cable customer.
Method Studios (www.methodstudios.com), which is headquartered in Los Angeles and has eight other offices worldwide, did the campaign's VFX. In addition to the split-screen work, which enables Lowe to interact with his other persona, Method handled prosthetic cleanups, digital matte paintings, 2D enhancements, and compositing. Most of the spots rely on Lowe's performances and prosthetic makeup to create alternate versions of the actor. For instance, Scrawny Arms required Method to create much of the other character, who has skinny, muscle-less arms that can'
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A complex lab where cars auto-assemble, a world where actor Rob Lowe meets Rob Lowe, favorite childhood toys coming to life, hand-to-hand combat scenes with a western Anime-style touch. These are some of the dazzling and fun TV spots that have challenged VFX studios in the past few months. Here's a look at some of the studios, creatives, and techniques behind these standout spots. 
