Race against waste
This is one of my favourite old commercials done around 2005 while working for Screenscene in Dublin. When originally shot it was planned that a lot of the destruction and dirt elements such as the debris elements would be done practically on set and so there was a very large engine from an old messerschmitt airplane brought on set where various bits of paper, boxes and dirt were thrown in front of it. Unfortunately it didn’t look quite as violent as was originally hoped so it was back to the 3d route to create all of the various bits of destruction in the commercial. The director’s idea was that the wave of rubbish wouldn’t roll over itself like a normal wave, it would roll back on itself and tear up from the ground to give it a more violent and unnatural sense. After tracking the shots in syntheyes, I set about the joyous task of using the terrible slow and unstable realflow 2 to generate the main body of the fluid wave. Back in the days of 32 bit computing this meant a tonne of instability, crashing, lost work and general cursing. We ended up with various different meshes of fluid elements which were either used entirely, or only for their alpha channels with their fill replaced with stock footage in the comp later. The various bits of rubbish were made with simple models fed into particle flow. The audi was a model I had made before hand and was animated before being fed through realflow for further cursing and generation of more elements of fluid pouring over the bonnet.
