Method Animates Girl Power for Kia’s Super Bowl TVC

Method Studios worked with agency David&Goliath on two commercials for Kia Motors that premiered during Super Bowl XLVII. ‘Hotbots’ for the new 2014 Forte compact sedan focussed on conceptualizing and constructing the ‘Hotbot’ character, a futuristic version of an auto show model who is overly protective of the attractive Forte.

VFX Supervisor Benjamin Walsh said, "After discussions with the director Carl Rinsch and the agency creative team, we concluded that the best method was to shoot practical models and track CG mechanical components on top. We combined the best features from around 20 different concept designs to come up with a unique and sexy looking Hotbot.”

Ben explained that they had initially planned to use as much of the model's body and skin as possible and just composite in the detailed CG mechanical joints revealed through clear panels. After some successful CG skin lighting tests, it was determined that only the live action heads and dresses of the models would be kept and the arms, chest and legs would be replaced entirely. This called for very precise animation to match up the 3D limbs with the live action.

Skin Deep

Attention was given to crafting the mechanics of the joints and the vein-like wires, which glow blue with energy, in a way that looked balanced and sophisticated. He said, “The clear plastic windows revealing the joints needed to demonstrate the complexity of the robots but not look too busy. We reduced the number of glowing wires in the final renders to allow the fine detail of the other components to be seen.

“Because we knew we had to create CG skin panels for use on the bevelled edges seen through the panels and in between the seams, we planned a test composite to determine where we would blend from the model to CG. After getting a great result on our CG skin lighting tests and render, it pushed us toward using all CG except for the dress and head. This also meant we could have a little more leeway in the rotomation work, eliminating the need for an exact match on the limbs if we were blending.”

Early on, Method, the agency and Carl Rinsch had together discussed the advantages of using at least the head of the model for both facial performance and beauty detail so that the body was the only remaining talking point throughout the shoot process. The dress was easy to keep and was one less type of material to worry about in CG, although the team did create a simplified version to use when creating contact shadows.

Light and Texture Data

The basis for modelling the limbs and torso was a body scan of the model, Alyssa, and a polarized texture shoot was carried out to give a strong foundation for textures. “To start the on the skin, we attempted to match the model's skin but after some lighting tests it appeared slightly too blotchy so we evened out the textures. Although she is meant to be a robot, we kept some subtle imperfections so it didn’t become too plastic,” Ben said.

“It was important that we were on set everyday of the shoot gathering camera data and shooting HDRIs and stills for reference or set extensions. All of our renders had a full complement of frame buffers to recreate the beauty lighting additively and embedded RGB mattes as well to provide additional control.  A template was propagated by our compositing supervisor, Dominik Bauch, to quickly reach a level of consistency across all shots.”

When it came to getting the model moving, some tracking and matchmove challenges arose when compositing the mechanical components over the real actress. Ben said, “Rotomation was extremely difficult for this job.  We were lucky enough to get a full body scan of the actress at the beginning and shot a range of motion from five, synchronized cameras to accurately replicate her movements in the rig. Unfortunately, the schedule didn't allow time to fully finesse the rig, so a portion of the final rotomation was done with manual in-scene deformations.  Our primary tracking was done with SynthEyes and secondary deformations were completed in Maya.

Short Fuse

“We used three different ways to collect data on set. First, we used a Leica Total Station to generate a 3D survey of the set, props and camera position. We also captured 360° photogrammetric information of the environments to line up to the survey geometry. Finally, we had witness camera sync to the main camera on set to record all the movements of the talent from a third perspective.”

When the lovely model at last loses her temper with her disrespectful customer, she picks him up and throws him across the studio, smashing a table. To create the right level of action, the Method team had to rotoscope and move the man over to create the illusion of contact from her knee to his head. In 2D they also warped his body slightly to exaggerate the impact to help sell her surprising strength. “We created a matte painting of wall damage from the stunt double's impact. Luckily they decided to use the takes of the man with his underpants pulled over his head so this eliminated the need to worry about head replacement,” Ben explained.

Method’s sister company Company 3 handled the grade. The two teams generally work together very closely on their joint projects. “We made sure we attended any grading sessions that have VFX intensive work. The agency and director wanted a very clean look that worked well with the robots in the bright neutral showroom,” Ben said.  www.methodstudios.com