As the Fast & Furious movies feature a huge amount of action, the brief here was to create something with a real sense of drama. The purpose of the teaser was to drum up some excitement for an action-packed live show featuring many of the cars from the film series.
It was quite a challenging, open-ended brief that required an awful lot of careful attention to detail and creative vision.
The key theme here was playing with light. Working carefully from reference data, we built, textured and animated a full-CG Dodge Charger, which had to appear as realistic as possible (until it pops a wheelie at the end...)
The fire motif was selected as it provided a visually interesting light source full of inviting colour and warmth, as well as dynamic, changable light play over surfaces.
CG Supervisor Tom Rowell, who directed the commercial in-house, said: "All cameras were shot for real, then tracked and used in CG to help sell the realism.
"Hours were then spent adding tiny details to the vehicle throughout the sequence. Imperfection is often much more believable than perfection when it comes to CG. These details included small dents and chips in the paintwork, oxidation on metallic parts, dust coverage and more."
In addition to the photoreal car animation achieved in Maya and Redshift, we also did a little bit of crowd work in the arena shot towards the end.
We had loads of fun working on this one and we’re really proud of the result. Let us know what you think!