Mercedes 'Clouds' commercial casts epic shadow

The latest commercial ‘Clouds’ for leading marque Mercedes tells an epic story of a slick car dodging crushing shadows as cast by an Armageddon sky.
The idea centres around two battling ‘cloud gods’ and hence required intense 2D and 3D input. The Mill began R&D eight months in advance of the airdate, back in November 2003, intricately researching the complex forms and structures of clouds.
Shot on 35mm but posted in HD, every shot required considerable post-production, with many shots being composited from over 100 layers. The car was shot on an empty desert surrounded by a mainly blue, cloud-less sky. Most clouds and shadows visible in the final edit were created and added in post. Continuity was a particular concern; each cloud was choreographed around the car’s movement and then finessed with light rays, lightning and colour contrast. Mill MD, Pat Joseph, said: “It’s possibly the most demanding project we’ve ever undertaken.”
CG elements were tracked onto real clouds to maintain a high level of realism and additional layers of clouds were added in Flame to enhance CG elements.
The ad's dramatic reverse pull-back shot, diving from sky to car, was created in post by making the start frames ‘wider’. This was achieved by building extra scenery in 3D at the edge of frame. Similarly, dust trails behind the car were extended to give a grander scale.
Given the complexity of the camera moves, the Mercedes was often placed on a static rig, which involved in considerable clean-up and complex compositing to make these rigged shots look like high-speed driving shots.
‘Clouds’ became highly dependant on hi-res digital stills - The Mill’s visual effects supervisors attended the shoot and took nearly 20,000 digital stills to create time-lapse cloud-building sequences.
The Mill’s CG team relied heavily on fluids in Maya 6, and proprietary software as the team of nine animators worked on the project for several months.
The dynamic CG cloud movements are a first in post production. Since the job was posted HD, The Mill’s 3D team investigated ways of speeding-up render times by integrating Maya 6 and Mental Ray using fluids and dynamics.
The CG department also implemented a new method of streamlined project management - this included a dedicated cloud website, outlining every setting used so everyone involved could track the development of each 3D cloud.
(SP)