With A Twist Studio provided the drive for two new Pontiac spots that take viewers on a joy ride through a ‘sexy’ world that looks as though it was ripped from the pages of a graphic novel.
Conceived by Miami-based agency Accent Marketing and produced and designed by Imaginary Forces, the spots blend CG and live elements to create a unique noir-ish aesthetic with actors inhabiting stylized urban environments and everything is rendered in black & white?Äîexcept for a few swaths of bold color applied to the cars and other select objects. Imaginary Forces produced the live action and created the CG environments. With A Twist Studio provided the dynamic animation and exquisitely lit photo-real CG cars.
One spot follows a man in a red leather jacket as he hurriedly descends a fire escape to keep a rendezvous with a beautiful woman driving an identically red-hued Pontiac G6 convertible. In the other spot, a woman in a skin-tight yellow dress strolls through a bar, waiting impatiently for the arrival of a yellow Pontiac G5. Both spots refer viewers to the website: www.pontiac.com/sexy .
Imaginary Forces shot the actors against green screen and composited their desaturated images into the CG environments. With A Twist, meanwhile, applied its expertise in CG cars to creating the two hot Pontiac models. ‘We’ve worked on several projects with Imaginary Forces and have developed a very good working relationship,’ noted With A Twist CG Supervisor Brandon Bartlett. ‘For this project, IF provided us with the background animation and we placed vehicles into their scenes – our job was to make the vehicles look real and perform, almost like characters.’ With A Twist previous work with Imaginary Forces includes an earlier Pontiac campaign and the trailer for the movie Transformers.
‘Every scene we received included a camera and a placeholder car from previs,’ fully explained VFX Supervisor David Burton. ‘While retaining all of that information, we had to clean up each file, integrate our in-house vehicle rig, and add the appropriate dynamics and animation.’
‘It was difficult to determine the right workflow as each scene was set up differently,’ added CG Artist James Kells. After the car animations were complete, they had to be rendered in tandem with IF original background animation to ensure they were perfectly aligned.
‘The two studios worked together closely to arrive at the final polished look,’ observed Executive Producer, Pam Hammarlund.
‘We simulated all of the lighting of the city environments based on IF design,’ added Bartlett. ‘There was a lot of back and forth collaboration, similar to how we have worked in the past.’
About With A Twist
With A Twist Studio has locations at 1713 Lincoln Boulevard, Venice, California 90291 (310)210-4802, and 1773 Star Batt Drive, Rochester Hills, Michigan 48309. For more information, call (248) 844-0044 or visit www.withatwiststudio.com.
Leave a Reply