Three Spots Take an Edgy Look at the Compact Car

Car commercials stick to a well-trod formula: a sleek, shiny car zips down the highway or, better yet, hugs the curves of a mountain road, on a perfect autumn afternoon.

It’s a big leap of faith to break that formula, but that’s what advertising agency RPA and production company/VFX house Digital Domain did for three Honda Fit commercials-“Mecha-Mosquitos,” “Defense Mechanism,” and “Bats,” which take place in an edgy, sci-fi CG world where gas-guzzlers can have mosquito wings, a horde of bats can live in a car trunk and automobiles inhabit a predatory underwater-like environment.

“Right away, we thought they were the best boards we’d seen all year,” say Digital Domain directors Eric Barba and Brad Parker. “The concept was exciting, clear, fresh and new.”

Santa Monica-based RPA’s creative directors David Smith, Joe Bratelli and Pat Mendelson came up with a way to distinguish the Honda Fit that flaunted all the received wisdom of car commercials. At Digital Domain, president of commercials Ed Ulbrich served as executive producer and visual effects supervisors Eric Barba and Brad Parker directed all three spots as well as fulfilled VFX supe duties. Spot Welders editor Michael Heldman edited all three commercials. “The new breed of director feels as comfortable behind a workstation as they do behind a camera,” says Ulbrich, noting that Barba and Parker already have director’s reels. “Our approach to this campaign speaks to that evolution.”

After receiving the boards for the three spots, say Barba and Parker, they decided to take a holistic approach and see if there was overlap in terms of art direction or design. “We ended up creating a map of the Fit universe,” says Parker. “The commercials each took place here or there, but all part of the same Fit world.”

FIT World Map

Working in concert with Digital Domain creative director David Rosenbaum, Barba and Parker created a map of the Fit world. Though the map isn’t a literal representation but more of a conceptual one, says Barba, it helped establish the visual language for the three spots. (And it was also used by RPA for the Honda Fit website.)

“This is important with CG in general, since you can do anything,” says Parker. “It’s good to lay down guidelines, otherwise you can end up with something too big, broad and over-the-top, without cohesion. Creating palettes and some environmental and performance rules helped us keep our eye on the target and not stray too far.”

But they also decided to take the color palette far off the beaten path. “Most car commercials have de-saturated, contrasty palettes, primarily due to shooting on film, transferring and trying to get a look from the film,” explains Barba. “We wanted to take the color palette much farther than you typically see in a car commercial.”

The Mecha-Mosquitoes have a dusty, brilliant, sunset color palette. Bats-in which an endless flock of spooky bats emerge from the capacious Honda Fit trunk-is “Sleepy Hollow,” says Parker. “They knew they wanted it to be moody but fun,” he says. “Tim Burton is the master of that dark humor, and that’s what we were going for.”

“Defense Mechanism” shows the Honda Fit turn into a very prickly blowfish when an aggressive “shark” car menaces it, in an environment that references underwater. “Since the [villain] car was a shark, we thought, let’s extrapolate on that,” says Barba. “We made the buildings look as if they were constructed of coral. All the underwater clues are subtle-buildings with curved girders that look like kelp-but it gave us this underlying bed to tie it all together.”

The CG was modeled in NewTek LightWave 3D, animated in Autodesk Maya and then rendered in LightWave, and matte paintings were created in Adobe Photoshop. “That’s our pipeline, and it’s a pretty robust system,” says Barba.

The first and most important rule of animation, says Parker, was John Lasseter’s maxim: “Inanimate objects should move in a way that doesn’t modify their physiology,” he says. “A cell phone shouldn’t bend, for example, if it walks. That was behind our thoughts: that objects moved in a plausible way and we weren’t cheating too much, that it’s possible to create a flying car, but we tried not to make it too fantastical. For example, the shark car was something you could actually manufacture – and it has a lot of character.”

“Performance takes its cues from the environment,” says Barba. “The Mecha Mosquitoes act like aggressive insects. They’re hungry and desperate, sucking these tankers dry of fuel. And the Fit becomes the hero of the spot, because he’s teasing them, baiting them, leading them on. And he’s more nimble and sharp. It’s difficult to make an inanimate object have a sense of humor, but it’s also fun.”

Barba says the early animations are fun to watch. “Nobody has seen an old vehicle acting like a mosquito,” he notes. “We played with scale and made the oil tankers a little larger than life, which made the Fit smaller. It’s tiny but playing with the tankers, leading them to their doom, in a fun way, with a smirk on its face in the last shot.”

In “Defense Mechanism,” the trick was to create cars with personality, living in a surreal undersea world. “When they were animated they were given subtleties of movement that suggested where they lived in this world,” says Barba. “The shark car had a shark-like swagger before the attack. The little cars that make up the cast of this world scattered like schools of fish. The Fit was fearless, waiting until the last moment to reveal its true self.”

“Bats” had to communicate the creatures without being “icky or unappealing.” “We changed their proportions to help create that feeling,” he says. “Their eyes were unusually large and had a eerie surreal glow. They had no fur, but just a leathery skin.”

Barba and Parker decided that all three commercials should rely on real-world camera movements. “We wanted to obey all the natural limits of a real camera,” explains Parker. “This means we took into consideration the speed in which the camera moves, the placement, the rotation and feel. Little things like shake and operator error were added to make us familiar with the traditional aspect of the camera. Our thought was that the camera should always feel as if it’s mounted on a car-to car-rig, or some type of camera arm, like a Russian Arm or R2 rig.”

The deadline added another challenge: Digital Domain had five weeks from boards to completed spots. “Even four or five years ago, spots like this would have taken two to two-and-a-half times the schedule to execute them,” says Barba. “To do all three spots in five weeks was a lot of work.”

Digital Domain animators all vied to work on the spots, say the directors. “The animators got really excited,” says Barba. “Everyone wanted to get their hands on a mosquito car, even the bats and the shark car. They’re all characters, and our CG artists love to do something creative.”

Over the five-week period, 46 artists rolled on and off the project, and the DD team completed the job on time. “This is a team that was always capable of this kind of work but doesn’t always see work this creative and fun,” says Parker. “It was great to get something so whimsical and interesting.”

Barba reports the working relationship between agency and the animation team was solid. “They were fantastic to work with,” he says. “These guys were on board and supportive throughout the whole process. It was a very collaborative process.”