I was brought in to King and Country, a small production and motion graphics house, in 2010 as their Visual Effects Supervisor. The goal was to build a visual effects department that would help take the company, and the scope of work, to the next level. I had been there nearly 2 years when the storyboards for this job were placed in front of me. This was the “next level” type of project we had been building up for. It was certainly the most ambitious VFX job that King and Country had taken on up to that point. 5 photo-real CG cars, each one modeled then broken up and rigged in order to have them transform. Photo-real interiors for each car that also needed to be modeled, chopped up, and rigged. Luggage, cameras, video games, clothes, glasses, facial hair, etc all need to be built as virtually every person and ever item in this commercial morphs from one iconic era to the next.
Behind the scenes footage and VFX montage. © King and Country
To achieve the effect of traveling through 50 years of time in just 30 seconds a tremendous amount of planning went into this spot long before anything was filmed. We worked closely with the make-up and wardrobe departments, as well as the art department, to not only coordinate all the different styles and accessories for each era in time but to help facilitate the digital transitions that would come later. A team of artists worked on mapping out the entire commercial in previs so that we could sit down with the director and 1st AD to plan out each gag in every shot which amounted to well over 100 transitions in total. We took this previs and shot breakdown with us to the shooting location and it proved an invaluable reference when setting up each shot under an extremely tight shooting schedule.
One we had our live action footage the real fun began. We used Autodesk Maya to model, surface, and animate each of the 5 fully digital cars used in the commercial, one for each decade beginning in the 1950s. Maya was also used to model and animate all the car interiors, clothing, toys and accessories that transformed in the spot. One of the first things I did when I was building the new VFX pipeline at King and Country was to add Chaos Group's Vray to the rendering pipeline and it paid off beautifully on this spot. We were able to take the HDR images I compiled from the shoot locations and with minimal adjustments exactly duplicate the lighting environment present that day on set. Along with careful shading work using the new car shader nodes in Vray the result was a seamless transition from real car to digital car and vice-versa.
Documentary on the making of Motel 6 “Metamorphosis”. © The Richards Group
It was pretty amazing what we were able to pull off with a relatively small crew and with the modest resources available to us at King and Country. It was at sometimes hectic and sometimes frustrating but in the end a very rewarding project to work on.
Credits
Project Title: Motel 6 “Metamorphasis” Running Time: :30 Debut Date: 04/09/12 Client: Motel 6 Branding Agency: The Richards Group Brand Creative Group Head/Writer: Chris Smith Brand Creative/Art Director: Peter Everitt Producer: Sheri Cartwright Production Company: King and Country Director: Rick Gledhill Executive Producer: Jerry Torgerson Line Producer: Gary Kout Post Producer: Paul Winze Director of Photography: Jordan Valenti Editorial, Animation, VFX: King and Country Editor: Andrew Maggio Art Director: Jon Lorenz VFX Supervisor: Bryant Reif Designers: Rick Gledhill Mike Goubeaux Gabriella Russo Pietro Desopo Tom Kenney Greg Mitchell Dan Hamilton Previsualization: Billy Maloney Hugo Codinach Jon Lorenz Mike Johnson Bryant Reif 3D Artists: Kyung Park Mike Johnson Andrew Cook Billy Maloney Andrew Parris Chris Kelley Greg Mitchell Adam Swaab Tim Salikov Compositing Artists: Jon Lorenz Rick Gledhill Tom Kenney Chris Kelley Adam Swaab Telecine Company: New Hat Colorist: Bob Festa Sound Effects Company: Lime Studios Audio Mixer: Loren Silber