A commercial about tyres wouldn’t appear to be the most stimulating brief but Bridgestone’s latest TVC, Passion, is quite compelling. The voice-over hits you with this line: “It’s not something we think about very often… the ways in which each one of us makes contact with the earth… but it’s something Bridgestone has obsessed about for many years… your connection to this planet is your journey… and that’s our passion.” All the while we see your connection from underground.
The SA companies teaming up to bring Passion to life was the agency, The DWF Collective with production company Hammersmith and Elephant, the post production house Maker Moving Pictures and Ammotech, the animation and motion capture studio.
“We decided to go underground to get a perspective not often thought about; how we all make contact with the earth’s surface on a day to day basis,” explains Byron Grant, executive producer at Hammersmith and Elephant. “Something which is surely critical to a tyre’s functionality, safety and comfort.”Production of the shoot was done at Hammersmith and Elephant in Johannesburg, motion capture was done at Foghound Studios in Midrand and post was done at Maker Moving Pictures in Durban.
“The look and feel was in many ways determined by the reality of what the world would look like through a piece of glass,” Grant describes. “Colour is simplified and it’s mainly a world or profiles and shapes. Of course there is a suspended reality yet the result is quite plausible. There is an incredible amount of detail above the glass which lends credibility to each scene.” He adds that “The sound design separates each environment and adds a layer of authenticity to each scenario.”
Louis Enslin, owner, composer and engineer at Produce Sound says this TVC was quite an interesting one, “As we had to create a soundscape of the world from below, but not end up with a dark feel.”
He explains, “So we basically created each scene as you would hear it from above ground. We did a lot of foleys as we wanted to push the realness of the scenes. We then did another layer of sound with all the close-up sound as heard from below, mainly footsteps and ground-impact sound effects. Then we experimented with various techniques, and amounts of filtering to get the balance between all the elements in terms of how muffled the sound should be, and constantly cross referencing it on TV speakers, as this is where it has to be most effective.”
The sound ties together this commercial that was created sans cameras. “There were no cameras used. We used a motion capture system to capture performances, which was then transplanted onto CGI human assets,” explains Grant. “The whole setup, people, dogs, environments props etc are all CGI.”
The motion capture of the performances was done in one day and post-production took three weeks. The footage was then edited using 3D studio Max, Maya, Nuke and Adobe Studio. “The ads concept and treatment from director Brett Wild landed on production’s desk as pretty much a single thought,” says Grant. Working out how to realise the concept was where the fun really began. “We contemplated building a glass stage and shooting for real but the glass needed to be clear to key, and blurry for effect at the same time. The exec and the director conjured a ridiculous process involving wireframes and people in spandex suits with motion capture nodes, the post guru said yes we can, and the rest is history. Kudos to Mike Muller, agency ECD and client Jan Maritz who sat unflinching as we told them that plans had changed and that their ad would star wireframe puppets with bad haircuts.”
