We travelled to Capetown with Nick Meek to shoot this Nissan campaign for TBWA Paris.
“While some may think that adding technology detracts from the raw experience of driving, Nissan is proving that technology can turn your car into an exciting partner”
With the idea of humanising technology, it was appropriate that we all had the most fun with the spacesuit! Join us nn set with New Moon Productions in Capetown…
Simon from New Moon productions suits up!
In post-production, we put together the astronaut image and ‘painted’ it in Photoshop onto the side of the wall – see how we did it :
Client: Nissan
Agency: TBWA Paris
Photographer: Nick Meek
Photographer’s Agent: Prune Pariente, Florence Moll
Creative Director: Darren Rosenberg
Art Buyer: Claire Sougy-Walwer
Art Director: Joy Robin
Production: New Moon Production
Post Artist: Pepe Alram, Aljaz, Bezjak / Recom Farmhouse
We travelled to Spain with Nick Meek to shoot the new Nissan Juke in a series of elegant architectural settings. For post-production, this involved a wide spectrum of skills – from shooting duplicate cars in order to avoid complex reflections, bringing sunshine to a rainy day, and finally a dramatic day-to-night conversion.
For this shot, the reflections of the structure were too much to be removed in post, so Nick photographed duplicate cars inside and outside the building, Christoph captured additional backplate elements. We had to deal with very mixed weather conditions! The team went out on a boat to shoot the skyline – the cityscape that you see in the shot was puzzled together from many separate shots to get the perfect backplate, evocative of an attractive city without detracting the viewer from the car as the hero of the shot. Join us on location:
Nights are drawing in! After the shoot was completed, Nissan wanted a night-time version of one of the shots. This was a very interesting challenge – moving a very high key image to be ultra low key
The car is a new, special edition model, so the alterations were complex – far beyond just changing the colour. We re-rendered the paint and the interior of the car – only tyres and lights remain from the original model. Using the HDR spheres that we’d produced at the time, we re-rendered the building and environment. The floor was taken from the original (pre-retouching) imagery, so retained its texture and was accurate at night. We replaced the city at skyline at the back with sourced material to make a new nightscape.
The new shot retains the elegant simplicity of composition that is a key part of the original, whilst adding the distinct ambience of a moonlit night.
The Nissan All-Mode campaign has been a great opportunity for us to test our creativity in using a variety of source material. TBWA’s brief was to place each of the Nissan 4×4 vehicles in a location where the tracks of the car would mimic an element of the surrounding landscape.
We constantly had to vary the approach depending on the availability of images, so each final image became a different combination of CGI landscapes, landscapes we photographed, CGI cars and stock imagery. Below is a making-of to show how the Nissan Pathfinder has been assembled together from beginning to end.
See the campaign on our site here
CREDITS:
Client: Nissan
Agency: TBWA G1
Associate Creative Director: Fabian Braun
Art Director: Matthieu Darrasse
CGI Director: Kristian Turner at Recom Farmhouse
CGI Artist: Kristian Turner, Richard Jenkinson at Recom Farmhouse
Post Artist: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown at Recom Farmhouse
Our first project working with the great Rick Guest was a complex one, promoting the release of the brand new Nissan Pulsar. With a brief containing a multitude of elements and inspirations ranging from a cloud of dust to an electromagnetic iris, we needed to create an event to symbolise the birth of the Pulsar.
As Rick only had a very small time window to shoot the car in Madrid, we did an angle-finding session in CGI with him beforehand. As a result the car angle was client-approved by the time he got to the studio, saving some precious time. He also shot lots of cloud elements in a different photographic studio in London.
Once we had all the elements to work with, our retouchers started to assemble the background for the car, piecing together multiple images to create the explosion.
The Iris component of the background needed to feel dynamic in order to integrate with the explosive elements shot by Rick. To achieve this our CGI team researched and tested different techniques ahead of the shoot to find the most suitable for the job. It made sense to treat this element not as a still life, but as the frame of a video.
The following clips show some of the many particle simulations used to create the Iris as well as additional atmospheric effects for the shot.
Below is how some of the final Iris elements looked before being composited into the shot
Aside from the iris and the light burst, the other CGI element was the reflection of the environment into the car. The camera and car already existed in the digital scene making it relatively straight forward to line up the reflections which were then composited onto the photographic car by the retouchers. See the reflection in the screenshot below:
Hard work but really well done guys!
CREDITS:
Client: Nissan
Agency: TBWA G1
Art Director: Carina Wachsmann
Creative Director: Nick Cooper
Photographer: Rick Guest
CGI Director: Kristian Turner
CGI Artist: Kristian Turner
Post Artist: Pepe Alram, Kate Brown
We recently went with photographer Nick Meek to Paris and to lake Montriond in the French Alps to shoot the latest Nissan X-Trail campaign. The car and far backgrounds were captured photographically by Nick, whilst we built the architecture in CG.
It has been a long time since we last published something in this category where we show our work in detail. We put a lot of work into making our CG images look real! We add lots of small elements both in CG and in post-production and most of them will never be seen unless you are zoomed in at 100%. Read more
Commissioned by advertising agency TBWA Paris, this is the first of a few images made for the launch campaign of the new Nissan Qashqai, which already has been awarded ‘WhatCar?’ car of the year 2014.
The Qashqai is a hugely popular model and this new generation was unveiled about a week before we delivered the visual. Working with such highly anticipated cars was destined to be a little nerve wrecking as the pressure is on, but ultimately a highly enjoyable experience. Our senior retoucher Kate Booker and CGI director Kristian Turner went to Paris twice to present and discuss the project.
