The use of CG cars at Digital Domain was first employed as a technique in the Plymouth “Neon” automotive advertising campaign of 1996, which presented a number of playful “Neons” bouncing off of an unseen trampoline.

Conventional wisdom had the cars being shot practically, and then manipulated digitally; however, working for director Terry Windell of A Band Apart, visual effects supervisor Fred Raimondi came to the conclusion that the most artistic and cost-effective way to achieve this “effect”was to build and animate the cars digitally. Raimondi’s thought process went something like this: “What does computer graphics do best? The answer: shiny metallic things.

Ding—a car is a big shiny metallic thing, so it should be natural! ”With this in mind, he brought CG supervisor Eric Barba and Digital Domain’s Lightwave team on-board to recreate the photo-real look that was crucial to making the spot work. Relying on extremely high-resolution models, the team created all the textures, down to the safety-glass decal on the windows, that allow the viewer to distinguish reality from fiction—and, in this case, practical from CG. According to Raimondi, “lighting the cars became the key element in the process. When real cars are lit, they use a Fisher box, which actually isn’t as much lighting the car as it is reflecting a big white card onto the car. So what we had the artists do was, instead of putting light sources over the car, we had them put a big white card over the car. We then light that card and, like magic, we had a great CG car. ”The basic concept of CG cars took its next step into the mainstream with Dodge “Time” and “Time 2.” Using a technique similar to that employed in the “Neon” spot, director Terry Windell, this time paired with visual effects supervisor Ray Giarratana, had Eric Barba and his Lightwave team creating first, a Dodge Viper; and then, for “Time 2”, two additional digital vehicles.

With the 1999 Pontiac campaign for GM and creative agency DMB & B, Metal City and Metal Desert, director Ray Giarratana sought to create a highly stylised and entirely CG environment with a photo-real CG car. In particular, the goal of this campaign was to create digital camera moves intended to “mime” the characteristics of practical photography. In so doing, Giarratana, with digital director of photography Eric Barba and CG Supervisor Wayne England, succeeded in pushing the animation to the next level—tricking the viewer into believing that a practical vehicle had been shot and composited into a digital universe.

This latest series of commercials is, in many respects, the culmination of the efforts of Digital Domain to bring CG cars to life; and perhaps, most importantly, they represent the increased flexibility that digital imaging provides in the creation of advertising images.