Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1574
May 2009 17 Viewpoint n n n n by side with the picture car and allows you to capture it in motion. You'll see it on the set of virtually every car commercial, but because of its large size, it's never been successfully mounted on a picture car. Be- cause we were hoping to use the Russian Arm to shoot a full 360-degree view of the picture car, we had to look for the longest one we could find—it ended up extend- ing to 18 feet. Despite being so large, the device is relatively lightweight, so we'd be able to take it to our different shooting locations throughout Washington state. e main drawback to its huge size, however, was that we would end up having huge objects to remove in post. Complex Camera Moves With the technical hurdle of gear selec- tions out of the way, we were still left with managing the complex camera moves. We had many different connections and transitions to achieve in the final spot, in- cluding spinning the camera around the car and having it swoop inside the trunk to capture the Venza's "coupling distance." Our previs artist, Simon Dunsdon, cho- reographed all these moves, refining and perfecting them over the course of four weeks just to nail down all the different stops before shooting began. Additional digital work that we contrib- uted to the campaign included extensive rig and shadow removal on the vehicles, adding a CG roofline to the Venza car, doing full sky replacement, adding 100 percent digital snow in the driving scenes (where there was no snow to begin with), and orchestrating the complicated motion-control shots of the camera panning from outside the car and in through to the trunk and into the passenger area. And because the rigs had to be rotoscoped out, we ended up creating massive CG backdrops, including re-creat- ing an entire building in CG. In the end, despite the technical chal- lenges we had to overcome, the shoot went surprisingly smoothly, and I don't think even the crew knew just how difficult some of these shots were. Working closely with the directors to incorporate the visual effects process into preproduction and to have a hand in designing camera moves is always a thrill, and it is becoming more of a standard practice on productions across the board. e "In the Orbit" spot turned out better than I could have imagined. It's a huge compliment when you talk to people who are completely stumped about how we were able to achieve an effect such as that. ere are exciting applications for this technique that I can imagine Digital Do- main potentially using in future commer- cials or feature-film work. We were fortu- nate that Saatchi & Saatchi and Malcolm Venville gave us the opportunity to see if such an effect was even possible. n