Peeling out: Hollywood's A52 burns up the road with its latest commercial spot for Nissan. (Broadcast).

"There's going to be this sleek new black Maxima tearing down a desert road. It's going to be moving so fast that the paint is going to start peeling off, beginning at the front and continuing to the rear, until there's not a speck of paint left on it. Oh, and we're going to shoot the car from all sorts of angles--helicopter, motorcycle, car-mounted cameras. And if there's not enough motion, we'll shake the cameras to get a more aggressive feel."

Such was the storyboard developed by advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day for the 30-second Nissan "Paint Remover" commercial spot, which began airing this past fall as part of the 2003 Nissan Maxima campaign. The concept is brilliantly simple. Yet when production director Adrian Moat heard it, he knew that finding a CG team able to create the effects for a shoot involving so much motion and so many different and unusual camera angles was going to be a challenge. The solution was to turn to West Hollywood's effects and design studio A52, which has distinguished itself over the past six years by creating award-winning music videos and commercials. Some of the more recent honors garnered by A52 include a 2002 Clio Gold, a 2002 London International Advertising Award, and a 2002 Emmy.

Maxima Replication

A52's first task was to prove to Moat and team that the studio could create footage of a CG Maxima that was completely indistinguishable from live footage. Using a highly accurate polygonal model provided by the Utah-based 3D digitizing and modeling facility Meshwerks, A52's CG team, led by creative director and project visual effects supervisor Simon Brewster, used Side Effects Software's Houdini running on SGI Irix 6.5 to create an exact replica of the car. Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint 3D was used for texturing, and the final images were rendered in Pixar's RenderMan. The car was then animated with spinning wheels, synthetic suspension travel, and camera shake for added realism. According to art director Jason Stinsmuehlen, the test allayed all fears. "The car looked so real that almost everyone was asking where they had managed to get a hold of a [real] car," he states.

With proof that A52 was ready to handle whatever he threw at them, Moat and crew went out to the desert to capture the Maxima in its required setting. The shoot involved three black and two metallic silver 2003 Maximas: a black car with no equipment attached, a second black car with a movable camera mount attached to the frame, a third black model with practical smoke effects rigged to it, a silver car with no equipment, and a second silver car with a movable camera mount attached to the frame. Each car had been thoroughly bespeckled with tracking points beforehand. Despite the exhausting heat, the team photographed the cars from the car-mounted cameras, a motorcycle, and a helicopter, as well as from more traditional static angles through a telescopic lens. In the end, Moat proudly walked away with a lot of footage for A52 to work with.

The overall plan for the project as conceived by Brewster was to have the footage of the live black Maxima blend with increasing amounts of a silver CG Maxima, then gradually transition to a live silver Maxima blended with a black CG Maxima, until finally only a live silver car remained. However, with all the extreme angles and shots involved, this plan could not always be closely adhered to. "In a couple of ...