Mazda BT50
Friday, 18th January 2008
This ad came with a simple enough brief, take an existing commercial where the only scenery was fenceposts, and replace them with large stone text. Excellent.

There were some minor hurdles, no original footage, no idea how much painting had been done (we suspected sky replacements), no lens data, and worst of all, every shot moved. From basic pans to full camera-car work.

Initial tracks with Boujou proved to be too time consuming considering the length of the shots (some of them as short as 8 frames). This began the fun of "Doing it By Hand".

In its most simple form, each shot was worked out as follows.
1) Figure out the ground plane
Lining up the horizon and ensuring a ground mesh 'looked right'
2) Figure out the lens
All the text elements were modelled 'To Scale'. So this was simple a hit and miss affair testing lenses to see which appeared to have the correct vanishing point.
3) Line up first and last frames
So this is where things got rough. The first and last frames would be lined up as close to exact as they could be, and (generally) only a linear move between them was necessary.
4) Shake it baby!
The 3d footage was stabilised so it was still but the orientation still changed, then it was tracked in. Depending on the track-able points, there were times when this was done by hand. Motion blur was also applied at this stage.
5) Check - Revise - Survive
So on one or two of the shots, a simple linear orientation tween wasn't sufficient, and the shot would jump back to 3 for tweaking.
6) Finalise comp, provide edge mattes for Flame
The front facing and sides of the text had different mattes in case they required tweaking during the online.

The final billboard was entirely CG. Photos were taken of grassy areas and were then mapped onto geometry. The final lighting solution was a baked final gather, ambient occlusion and a direct lighting pass.

Before / After

The entirely CG end billboard