Reveal video presented at the Detroit Motor Show in January was directed by Polynoid and produced by Blacklist, with the animation executed at Polynoid production spinoff Woodblock.
Presented at the Detroit Motor Show in January, the reveal video for the Lexus GS F was directed by Polynoid and produced by Blacklist, with the animation executed at Polynoid production spinoff Woodblock.
When Los Angeles ad agency Team One approached the Berlin-based creative collective and animation studio with their concept for this reveal film, the Polynoid and Woodblock team thought it was almost too good to be true.
“The idea of changing the DNA of a car by injecting it with some kind of mysterious liquid by robots definitely got us excited,” says Polynoid director Fabian Pross, “so working on this piece for two months was intense, but great fun!”
Cleanup and modelling for the car was completed in Autodesk Maya, while all the other 3D created for the spot was handled in Softimage. The effects were built within ICE and everything was rendered using Solid Angle’s Arnold.
“Like most of our projects, we didn't do storyboards, but went directly to Softimage building a rough animatic which we used as a base to further refine and then build the final spot on,” Pross details. “Our pipeline is built in a way that we split up modelling, animation and rendering as separate tasks so we can work independently on each of the steps and have everyone concentrate on scenes that only contain the necessary assets. We're doing all our compositing work in [The Foundry’s] Nuke and use [Blackmagic] DaVinci for grading and conform.”
The biggest challenges for the project were creative, finding the right mood and rhythm as well as just teasing the product but still highlighting its features. “For the design of the set and robotics as well as the transformations we tried to develop it in a way that didn't resemble too much what we've seen a couple of times in commercials like this and we were really lucky Team One gave us the freedom to do so,” Pross adds. “We were happy to have Joel Corelitz work on the sound design, who joined early in the progress, so we could develop image and audio side by side and inspire each other.”
Source: Polynoid/Woodblock
