Joseph Tang/Brad Wood/Stefan Susemihl/Ed Poulson/Olivia O'neil/Zoe Cassey-hayes
The Mill
2d Artist
Giacoml Cavalletti/Sergio Xisto/Tom Hales/Alan Williamson/Alberto Lara/Benoit Gi
The Mill
3d Artist
Jiyoung Lee/Aurelien Ronceray/
The Mill
Matte Painting
James Bamford
The Mill
Colourist
The Campaign
Inspired by Honda’s daring spirit, the film pays homage to one of the boldest expressions of human curiosity and engineering endeavour; space flight.
Space travel-inspired iconography and cinematic details aim to capture viewers’ imaginations, from atmospheric photography to the same climatic classical music that was etched into the Voyager 1 probe’s golden record and sent to the outer fringes of the solar system.
Opening on Honda’s humanoid robot, ASIMO, the camera reveals a line-up of Honda products arranged on an impressive runway. The sky and sun are reflected in the road surface and the water below. Viewed from above, the formation mimics the familiar shape of a space shuttle or rocket.
Creative Execution
The VFX created a host of CG vehicles and atmospheric elements, which were then all seamlessly tied in with the cinematic live action footage in just 7 weeks.
The CG team worked to meticulously re-create Honda assets including the ASIMO Robot, NSZ, Jet and F1 cars to an extremely high specification; ensuring that each shot looked realistic and was able to blend naturalistically with the live action images.
The narrative is tied together through a billow of smoke, simulated in Houdini by a team of artists who generated particles via a flip simulation, as well as using multiple custom velocity fields to manipulate the smoke streams in a natural motion.
Artists worked to composite the fully CG vehicles so they sat comfortably along side real ones in the beautifully shot live action footage, one of the most challenging aspects of the project was creating this narrative of billowing smoke. The blizzard had to travel down the stack of vehicles increasing in its ferocity as the ad nears its climax. A mixture of carefully crafted 2D and 3D elements was used to achieve this, and the smoke became as much an integral part of the spot as the vehicles themselves.