Fiat "Elevator" case study
Fiat "Elevator" is a TV commercial I directed and VFX supervised. This piece is an example of "invisible visual effects."
People typically associate visual effects to explosions, alien invasions, laser battles, and so on; however, VFX's are used, at least to some degree, in most films, TV shows, commercials, music videos, even when you don't see them. A well-planned effect can save the production logistics hurdles, time, and money as opposed to achieve the same shot in-camera.
In this comedy spot, a Fiat car maneuvers in a building lobby and swiftly backs into an elevator full of people. Before breaking this 'stunt' down, one may think that this can easily be achieved practically, without needing digital effects of any kind. However, upon breakdown, you start asking yourself questions like "where do I find a corporate lobby large enough to drive a car in?", "where do I find an elevator large enough to accommodate a car (and its weight...) together with more than a dozen actors?". Here is when you realize that probably such a place doesn't exist, and even if it existed, you could still not fit a car into the elevator.
At this point, we designed a fake elevator that suited our needs, and we later built it in a giant green screen sound stage. To achieve this, I worked closely with the production designer and created a scale 3D previz of our scene. Now I was able to plan the VFX shots in great details, including calculating all the car trajectories with millimetric precision. Only a small portion of the set was built as we prepared to make the rest of it using digital set extension techniques.
On the principal photography days, thanks to the previz, everything was already carefully planned. All the camera angles and positions were logged and compared against the previz data. Electronics lenses were chosen to embed all the lens metadata directly into the footage, lowering the risk of logging mistakes. Lens distortion charts and color lookup tables were recorded as well. All the camera movements were previously crafted and simulated in the previz so that they could be replicated effortlessly during the shoot. Additionally, we took hundreds of photos of the talent, props, and the set from multiple angles, which we would then use during compositing for reflections and as a reference, among other things. Finally, we took a spherical HDR picture of the set, and we 3D scanned the car using photogrammetry techniques.
Once we wrapped the principal photography, the VFX plates shoot was scheduled at a later date. This took place in an enormous photo studio that resembled a beautiful modern lobby. The background plates were filmed with a matching camera, lenses, and employing all the technical filming data from the main shoot. We then 3D scanned the entire room with photogrammetry techniques and captured a series of spherical HDR images to be used to cast physically-accurate light and reflections on the computer graphics elements later added to the scene. When in post-production, it was possible to 3D track the filmed car with the help of the 3D model scanned on set, achieving very accurate reflections on the car's body.
You can watch the full spot here: www.mzo.tv/portfolio/fiat
