Cutting-edge automobile technology demands a sportily engineered campaign, so when Japanese agency Hakuhoodo Photo Creative set out to create a 60-second spot for the new Toyota Prius, they went to Anonymous Content’s Andrew Douglas, a top spot director who knows his way around effects. Having helmed the remake of The Amityville Horror, Douglas found that the agency’s concept dovetailed neatly with his own visual style and storytelling instincts. "Their idea was that these waterfleas mate, have babies, and all die and eventually become oil," he explains. "But millions of years later, the oil reserves are running out, so it’s a little allegorical tale about diminishing reserves and the need for the new hybrid technology of the Prius."

Douglas, who acts as his own DP, scouted locations and shot the car for the day using his usual Pan-Arri 435 package. But he decided to do most of the spot in CG, "even including the shots inside the gas tank, which were cheaper to create than doing it live," he reports. "I began by storyboarding everything and then edited that storyboarded material with Mike Elliot of Mad River Post in L.A. That in turn became the basis for all the pre-vis material, which was rendered out at Digital Domain and then cut by Mike over at Mad River."

"I began by showing Andrew what we could do using various electron-microscopic photographic images of real fleas," says Digital Domain visual effects supervisor Eric Barba. "He got very excited by the live stuff as well as some of the 2D microphotography and the idea of making it 3D. We then were able to move forward and design one in 3D- artist Dave Adams modeled it in Lightwave. We then ran tests for design work and shape studies on how the outer and inner membranes looked, and how we’d differentiate between the female and children versions. Dave and CG supervisor Jay Barton developed it more and then, working with compositors Janelle Croshaw and Greg Teegarden, we rendered out a bunch of test images." Once Douglas had approved the final flea image, the Digital Domain team began animating in Maya and Lightwave. "We bounced back and forth between them, depending on what we were animating," adds Barba. "Then we rendered with Lightwave and with our own in-house tools such as some shaders and Nuke, our compositor, which we used to put all the pieces together and give it a watery look." The spot was conformed in Inferno and Rob Moggach did the final color tweaking and added some stars for the end shot.