Telling the history of Hyundai’s innovative technological journey through a visual transformation of the older internal combustion engine into the all-electric modern Ioniq 5 presented Fin’s VFX crew with a unique set of creative and technical challenges.

SYNOPSIS

Set in the epic graphic Australian Flinders Ranges outback landscape, a classic older Hyundai Excel model travelling down a rugged, dusty road, dramatically transitions into the elite Hyundai Ioniq 5 model smoothly cruising on a tarred road.

A young man driving the Excel recounts the Hyundai legend of the founder’s determined vision to ‘change the world’, defy the odds, fulfil a dream and create a legacy of excellence and sophistication. The Hyundai evolution of innovation is physically ‘brought to life’ as the older Excel, while in motion, bit by bit, feature by feature, slowly peels away like a snake shedding its skin, and starts to dramatically morph externally and internally into the modern Ioniq 5 model: parts of the car crinkle, peel, shatter and fly off into the air, interiors unstitch, structures change, the dashboard modernises in front of our eyes: demonstrating Hyundai’s accomplishments.

VFX Notes

Achieving this required many layers of complex CG simulations, executed in Houdini, to represent the various different materials of the old car giving way to reveal the new one.

Paint flakes are shed into the breeze, sheet metal crinkles and peels like aluminium foil, seats are seen to unstitch themselves thread by thread and the dashboard vinyl shrivels away to nothing.

 Each element required multiple iterations of look development to find the right visual signature for its motion.

Overarching all of the shots was the fundamental issue that the IONIC 5 is physically larger than the Excel from which it emerges.

Much attention was paid to evolving the flow and the pacing of the visual effect beats to make this visual paradox a non-issue in the final film. 

Although the film was shot in spectacular fashion amongst the iconic Flinders Ranges, the dirt road along which the car is travelling, required extensive digital alterations to parts of the landscape to maintain a consistent appearance across the shots - sometimes requiring 3d vegetation to cover up swathes of barren roadside dirt.

A large cloud of CG dust behind the car was added to lend an epic feel to the hero car’s progress through the outback scenery. With almost no two shots containing the same visual effects recipe, it’s true to say that this beautiful spot stretched the VFX crew’s artistic repertoire like few others in recent memory.

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