BMW Spot Is Tour De Force Through Virtual Factory

'Production Line', the new spot for BMW's new BMW 1 Series Coupé features a voyage through a virtual car factory, a trip made possible by Framestore CFC.
The 40-second spot was created by Ollie Bearle at WCRS, and produced for them by Sally Lipsius. It was directed for Outsider by Dom and Nic, who returned once more to Framestore CFC and to frequent collaborator, VFX Supervisor Ben Cronin.

The spot is set at an uber-modern assembly line and with the exception of the human beings, virtually everything you see in Production Line, from environments to robots to cars, is CG.
Leading the 3D team on this ambitious and intensive project was Techical Director Diarmid Harrison-Murray: "It was quite a challenge for several reasons. HD delivery meant big renders, and just the sheer volume of CG material we had to generate," he said.
Senior team members Cronin and Harrison-Murray attended the five-day shoot in London's Black Island Studio. The shoot was fairly technical, sticking closely to the angles and distances worked out by Cronin, who had produced a detailed previsualization of the film in Flame before the shoot.
For Harrison-Murray it was a sobering experience: "Finishing the shoot really brought home just how much we had to do to fill in the gaps," he recalled.
The two also visited the BMW plant in Leipzig: "It was an invaluable visit to an extraordinary place," said Harrison-Murray, "It informed and inspired much of the work we did on the spot, both in terms of the architecture and the robots."

The first section of the project was largely centred on modelling and texturing. A small team set about tackling the various areas. Senior Modeller on the project, Alex Doyle, took charge of the detailed technical job of modelling the different robots and their various attachments and heads. The rest of the team set about building and texturing a library of different architectural elements from which the environments could be constructed. While this was going on Harrison-Murray set about cleaning up and optimizing all the CAD data for the car which needed to be pared down to a usable level of detail as it comes from BMW with every single, nut, bolt and washer in there, literally millions of polygons of geometry.
The second phase of the project brought on board a full team of around seven Technical Directors for the two months or so needed to create the spot. Using the previsualization as a template, each shot was constructed and animated with the hi-res models.
BMW were also in attendance at the spot's final telecine, created by Framestore CFC Senior Colourist, Dave Ludlam.
As the film was for both cinema and TV, Ludlum scanned it in at full HD 444 RGB resolution, ensuring there would be no compromise on the quality of the images.
In addition to enhancing the spots hi-tech look and matching the tone to the press campaign, this final grading was an opportunity to convincingly pull all the shots together.
(SP)