The Mill complete life-size Ford Fiesta pinball spot

Director Antoine Bardou-Jacquet has completed a high-profile car spot with The Mill, ‘Pinball’, for the Ford Fiesta.
In order to create a natural look, the team insisted on using a real car and a real pinball machine. The challenge for The Mill came in convincingly melding these dramatically differently sized scenarios.
The Mill’s senior Flame artist, Barnsley, applied a solution for marrying macro and micro by calculating the scale difference between the actual car and the hypothetical car (as it would have appeared if it were the pinball). Barnsley calculated it would be 86 times smaller than a real car. So every measurement relevant to the pinball shots was painstakingly enlarged 86 times when the real car was shot. For example – if the camera in a pinball shot was 10 mm away from the imaginary pinball/car, the camera’s position in the actual car shot would be placed at 860mm away.
After shooting the pinball table, using a specially designed life-scale model and an endoscope camera lens the size of a long cigarette, the real car was shot in a studio. Camera angles and distances we recreated to mirror those of the pinball shots. Barnsley ensured exact matches between pinball and car shots by using proportionally scaled boxes (one representing the actual car, one representing the car if it were the pinball). By shooting the smaller box in situ on the pinball table, the car shot could be made to match by using the larger box and aligning its position to the smaller box on video overlay.
“It took a lot of patience and organisation,” said Barnsley. “We had to carefully log and file every shot.
To guarantee the concept worked in post, Barnsley was heavily involved in pre-production and supervised every shoot day.
In order to make Pinball appear as realistic as possible, extensive 3D work was required to incorporate naturalistic shadows and reflections in the pinball, the car and the pinball table. 3D artist Russell Tickner, generated a precise replica of the pinball table using the model-maker’s artwork. Tickner also fed the computer-recorded lighting patterns from the pinball table into his CG model to recreate the same lighting sequence. He then built a CG Ford Fiesta, animated it as per the live action and picked-up the reflections generated by the software. These reflections were fed into Flame to create a life-like situation.
(GB)