Working with lead artists David Whittle and Sainty (Henry St. Leger), who are known as street artists, directors Ben Foley and Chris Hopewell created a 30 second television commercial for Acura called Wall Art in which the car is shown in an animated environment.
What you might assume at first to be CGI, compositing the car image into cartoon drawings done on paper or in a computer graphics program and composited together in the usual computer special effects suites, is instead a completely different approach, in which the images themselves are drawn, life size, on huge 60′ x 40′ (18m x 12m) canvases.
The canvases were drawn, painted over and redrawn, as if they were enormous animation cell backgrounds, and other elements were drawn on the floor and even on the car itself, animating a life-size driver and the images of birds as seen from above against the car.
Even the apparent turn of a corner that goes by at one point is hand drawn animation. All of the apparent motion is in the drawn animations and the position of the camera. The car never moves.
(It brings to mind the remarkable MUTO wall animation I wrote about in March.)
The Acura Wall Art shoot took 17 painters and 240 hours of shooting over ten days. There is a “making of” video on the t5m.com site, that includes the final 30 second spot at the end.
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See You.
I really enjoyed watching that. Though I can’t help but think of all the work, time and effort that this took and feel the pain, haha. I’ve seen a few commercials lately that are very similar to MUTO. Not so long ago I saw one about a kid eating something, running into a all and then becoming animated. I’ve been looking for it in youtube, but since I don’t remember what the commercial is about, I cant find it.
And following that same animation line, maybe you’ve seen this video by Oren Lavie, but just in case, check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY&feature=fvst I really enjoyed it.
Take care, Charley. :)
Wow, that was a lot of work. I’m shocked it only took 10 days to animate! Stop-motion animation never ceases to amaze me.
This is my first comment on your blog, although I’ve been reading it for a long time now. I check it almost every day. It’s great! Keep up the good work! :D
This begs the question…why? Why didn’t they just shoot the car against a green screen and composite in the computer? Surely this would have been more cost effective?
Then again, 17 artists found work for ten days. When’s the last time that happened?
I can’t help but think that the intention of the extra trouble and unusual approach was exactly this, to create some buzz online.
Nice Painting. Great effort put on the painting and the result is also great.