Computer Graphics World

e overall concept of the campaign— which included three television and the- atrical spots, along with elements for an interactive Web program—was to create a unique Fit universe. is meant that ev- ery object had to be conceptualized by the Digital Domain team and then brought to life. Yet, the three commercials contained very different ideas selling very different features of the same car. And all three had to have an extremely stylized look. "So rather than go off and do three dif- ferent designs with development paths, we pooled our resources and decided to create a cohesive world, or universe," says Parker. "When we pitched the job, we created a map similar to Middle Earth, laying out where the three commercials would take place in the Fit world and how we would tie them together. We had to make thou- sands of decisions about what the world would look like, including the color pal- ette, the creatures, everything." Later, the group used that map as a guide for the on- line materials, which included games. Spot On Two of the three television commercials— "Mecha-Mosquitoes" and "Defense Mech- anism"—are 30 seconds long and 100 percent CG. e third, "Bats," is only 15 seconds in length and contains some live components. In "Mecha-Mosquitoes," giant mechani- cal mosquitoes, with chrome wings and bod- ies of hulking gas-guzzling cars, gorge them- selves on fuel from an overturned gasoline tanker truck on the outskirts of a city. Soon a swarm begins to chase a passing Honda Fit, which darts in and out of traffic to fend off the attack. In the city, the car reaches a tun- nel under a huge building shaped like a bug zapper, whose blue light proves too irresist- ible, and fatal, to the insects. e second all-CG spot, inspired by un- derwater photography with a cyan/green/ yellow palette, is set within the Fit world's city limits. A menacing shark-like gas-guz- zler patrols the streets, knocking down signs and recklessly skidding around corners, while a Fit waits at a stoplight with other vehicles. As the monster car approaches, the other vehicles scatter; the car accelerates aggressively toward the Fit. Just before im- pact, the Fit inflates like a blowfish, sending the mean machine zooming off. "Bats," meanwhile, illustrates the Fit's cavernous storage capacity by housing and releasing a cadre of the Fit world's resident bats at an eerie "lookout point." e style of the commercials, with their dramatic action, striking colors, and atypi- cal characters, is a big departure from the type of realistic work Digital Domain is known for—including the groundbreak- ing accomplishments on e Curious Case of Benjamin Button (see "What's Old Is New Again," January 2009), for which Barba served as visual effects supervisor. e team was up for the challenge. "I love working with an empty canvas. You have more ownership and control over every pixel when you create and de- sign something from scratch—vehicles, objects, buildings, and environments that look concrete in a way, where you can al- most reach out and touch them, although they are clearly stylized and do not exist," Parker says. However, he does caution that in such circumstances, you have to exercise some constraint and give yourself some basic rules to avoid going off in wild direc- tions that aren't going to serve the purpose of the story. On the other hand, creating such an open-ended project can be difficult be- cause the concepts are so loose. "ere's a lot of pressure to create something no one has ever seen before. ere's nothing harder than a client coming to you and saying, 'Make something really great and cool that is brand new and we have never seen before, and we'll tell you if we like it,' '' Parker adds. "It has become fairly standard to light cars in plate photography or create photorealistic effects in plate photography. But to design a world from scratch is prob- ably one of the hardest things we're asked to do." A Fit World Although the world in these commercials is super-stylized, the Honda Fit has a more realistic appearance. To create that imag- ery, the modelers started with basic digital scans of the car's exterior, which CG super- visor Richard Morton and his team then enhanced. Drawing on experience they honed earlier in 2008 crafting vehicles for the feature film Speed Racer (see "Photo Anime, Hyper Pop Art," April 2008), on In the all-CG "Defense Mechanism," a semi-realistic Honda Fit (left) faces a gas-guzzler (middle), which, like the cityscape and the puffed-up Fit (right), is super-stylized. The artists built the models in LightWave, while surface shaders developed for Speed Racer gave the vehicles their shine. February 2009 35 Broadcast n n n n

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