Radium studies physics for Toyota spots - Post News

Post, June, 2003

SANTA MONICA--Visual effects house Radium (www.radium.com) completed a two-spot campaign for Toyota Motorsports via Saatchi & Saatchi, LA, and directed by Ago Panini of Chealsea Pictures.

Downforce features a Toyota racing development engineer jogging through the streets, speaking in voiceover about making the laws of physics obey his needs. The engineer defies gravity as he effortlessly jogs along the walls of buildings and against the side of a bus to navigate his way through the city.

The production team used a three-point harness on the runner to lift, rotate and pull him along perpendicular to the walls. Panini shot virtually the entire 35mm spot handheld, which meant that Radium had no clean plates to work with in order to replace the backgrounds. Using Discreet Inferno, the Radium team--led by senior Inferno artists/visual effects supervisor Scott Radar--went through the footage frame-by-frame, removing wires, painting in shadows, replacing parts of the actors clothing where the harness was attached, rotoscoping to better place the actor onto the sides of the buildings and, color correcting the spot.

Light & Strong centers on a Toyota engineer making a paper airplane and tossing it in his office. The airplane travels endlessly in circles around his office until it breaks through a wall, continues down the hall, smashing through a water cooler and then through the outer building wall into the city air Radium created the CG airplane and animated it to fly and break through the walls.

"You'd think creating a paper airplane would be easy, but its one of the hardest things to do," explains Radar. "It can't fly too fast or it will look fake, it has to have a lightness about it. Also, the lighting was very dramatic and paper picks up light in different ways, so that was crucial."

On set they filmed a paper airplane for reference and then built the CG paper airplane in Alias/Wavefront, which was also used to animate the motion and create the complex lighting effects.

To replicate the lighting, Radium used a technique called High Dynamic Range lighting, in which they shoot stills with a 180-degree lens on set. These stills were input into Maya, which then detects and re-creates the lighting that was employed on set "Based on color values, it knows where light and shadows are hitting the wall and then sets up your lighting pattern for you," explains Radar. "Then you tweak it a bit, but even with great lighting guys it moves the process along lot quicker."

Radium used Discreet Flame and Inferno for compositing and rendered with Pixar RenderMan. Additionally, Radium's Bill Weber edited both spots. Each concludes on a :07 end tag showing the Toyota race cars speeding around a track.