Brief Explanation

XV is a totally new hybrid city and sports vehicle. We express this concept by showing the car driving through various weather conditions and roads, which is actually the car itself.

Creative Execution

In this spot the script called for ‘car on car’ action and virtually demanded it be delivered 100% CG. The initial challenge was how to structure the car driving on itself through various weather patterns, and then to establish how it would look and feel. The trick to making the idea work was to subtly signal that all was not as it seemed. The miniature car was given a quirk to its motion, a slight weightlessness in the animation to give a sense that it’s not all quite real. The subtle depth of field effects also helped. Because of complex camera moves, the environmental elements had to be created - there was no component shoot for the mud, snow and rain. This meant a lot of work texturing the car, and getting mud splats and snow splats right required creating an animated file in Flame for Maya to turn the mud layers on and off as the car was moving. Usually sims are contained in small areas but these areas were huge; finding ways to achieve this was a wonderful challenge. In Maya and Realflow, sims such as the rain took 48 hours for the computer to do the calculations.