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I work at a competitor to The Mill so I have a little insight into this process. Ad agencies have grown accustomed to spending an enormous amount of money on VFX to make the cars in their spots look as perfect and attractive as possible (same with soda, people's faces, etc). They call this "beauty" work. For high end commercials this single line item can be over $30k (though I'm pretty sure The Mill charges more than I do). Most of the car commercials I do end up with full CG cars regardless of what they shoot because 1 they want the cars to look perfect, 2 they want to enhance the cars attractive qualities beyond all reality, 3 they want to be able to control every pixel, 4 they want to change elements of the car for different markets. That last one is probably a big reason The Mill would invest this kind of R&D in the project.
Doctorpangloss's point about product placement is no small thing either. As foreign markets become a bigger part of box office take being able to sell 5 different product placement deals in the same 20 shots is a big win.
Background from Wikipedia for others: "The Mill is a VFX & Creative Content studio headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with three offices in the United States... The Mill is usually well represented at the numerous Advertising and Visual Effects awards ceremonies world-wide each year."
In case anyone is wondering why you would use a CG car instead of a real car: The purpose of this vehicle is to allow large feature films to shoot with the Blackbird and sell a product-placed vehicle in post-production to the highest bidder. It's a brilliant way to maximize the value of the placement.
The Mill obviously doesn't spell this out in their press release. But this is all about native advertising.
That might be true except cars have vastly different wheel sizes and wheelbases. One video would only work for a single platform. Even then, the company states that the rig is customized per car to get the ride height and tire size right.
I think they use CG cars instead of real ones for the same reason everything is CG: cost. It's cheaper to just rent one of these from a local film studio than sending out a small fleet of actual cars to film in whatever salt flat they are using this time. It also gives them more control of the look and design of the car. Did you know that 75% of the items in an IKEA catalog are CGI?
Also, I wouldn't be surprised (given the tight release schedule of some car models and the secrecy around them) that this lets them film the advertising of a car concurrently with the final production stages. They don't have any cars coming off of the line to shoot with, so it's easier to rig up the wheelbase (which is established early in production) and get the marketing done concurrently.
> That might be true except cars have vastly different wheel sizes and wheelbases.
I see you didn't watch the video where they showed the wheelbase, wheel sizes/design, width of the platform, as well as suspension tuning can all be adjusted easily.
Pretty interesting, you could sell to different bidders in different countries.
I find it a bit sad that so much tech has been put into advertising, which, as an industry is inefficient and a costly zero sum game.
These are the same sentiments echoed by people who think we should stop spending on space development so we can focus on world hunger instead. That's not how it works.
Technology benefits everyone regardless of where it originates. Advertising is also a massive industry and economic driver that has led to the commercialization of the internet and many of the content, services and companies you perhaps take for granted today.
It's also by no means zero-sum as connecting products/services to customers is necessary to actually build all these other non-advertising businesses. For all the hate that advertising gets, the reality is that it's a critical component for any company's success.
Agreed, but consider it an analog of war technology. Much of it finds its way to more civilized uses.
In this case, what we have here is a great tool for vehicular motion capture that can be used in gaming and simulators as well. Ads may have been the motivation to begin with, but other uses can reap the benefits as well.
Reducing the cost of getting your message to the market without changing your customer acquisition rate is by definition not a zero sum game.
I think they are saying advertising itself is the zero sum game....not this particular modification to it. (and I don't agree advertising is a zero sum game, I think it is a very, very small number sum game :) )
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." --Jeffrey Hammerbacher
Well, maybe not entirely zero sum--if the advertisement lets you know about something you'd want but previously didn't know about, that's a net plus. Then again, those diet pill ads and other scams are a net minus, so maybe it washes out to 0 net.
> if the advertisement lets you know about something you'd want but previously didn't know about, that's a net plus
i count those things not as adverts, but as information sources. An advert is something that tries to convince you to buy _their_ brand of a thing, rather than informing you of the existance of a thing you didnt know about. Suppose there's a universal catalog which lists all possible products/services, then you'd have no need of the former, but the latter is still a zero sum game.
It's a bit tautological to say "If you remove all but x, then it's comprised entirely of x." I don't think most people would agree with your definition of ads, either. The first iphone ads were probably showing a lot of people something they didn't know existed, but you'd be hard pressed to find someone who called the "iphone information services" instead of ads. Even in the realm of what you might consider to be zero sum ads, that might not always be the case. "Oh this car has 4 wheel drive? That's something I could actually use." Boom, added utility.
I don't really grasp your analogy but your definition of advertising is not complete. Advertising does indeed include messages to increase product/brand awareness. It could be argued that in most advertising, this is actually the case.
How is advertising zero sum?
the amount you pay to stay on top is directly proportional to the amount your competitors pay to get you off the top.
The video looks super fake at around 1:05. The rear wheel is in the wrong spot.
Here's the direct link to that time point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnBC5bwV5y0&t=65
The whole body of the car has the wrong rotation at that point. The front tire is off as well.
It took me a while to pause the video at the exact spot.
And the car looks like it has to low weight.
But how do you film somebody getting in and out of the car?
Is that an action that typically appears in filmed car advertising?
It's fairly common. Think the successful male stepping out of the car and greeting his attractive wife.
So it draws a shell atop the stand in? That isn't enough. It doesn't seem to model flex, body roll, vibration or even accurate suspension movements. It won't fool car guys.
It's not automated. They take the data and use it to help create a CG car, but the final work is done by human animators.
It might not fool "car guys" but a large number of car commercials shoot with CG cars now.
100% correct.
They state in the video that they can adjust the suspension (I imagine this is more than just spring rates and shock stiffness but they didn't confirm). Watching the videos I was actually impressed that it seemed to accurately model the difference between a mustang and a corvette (I am a fairly serious "car guy"). The thing that got me was an Aveo spinning the rear tires... They didn't state if they could change the drive wheels. In most ads I would guess this wouldn't matter much.
The rig they are using is modeling only wheel movements, not proper suspension setups. Can it model how a Fiat500 will lift a rear tire in a sharp corner? You cannot do that with such a low center of gravity.
Yeah the CG is obviously way too low when they show the white sedan sliding around in the parking lot.
Also they say "any" car, but what they really mean is any car with worse performance characteristics than this car. (Try using it to simulate a F1 car)
> Try using it to simulate a F1 car
Those usually don't get that much advertisement because not that many people buy them.
Why do you need a rig? Can't ML algorithms predict what kind of movements a car should make to look realistic?
The rig helps with the outside environment as well. Don't have to fake tires going over multiple surfaces when you filmed real tires. Then there are the reflections. And so on.
But how do you chroma key the blackbird out of the video?
From what I could see, you don't. Rather it seems like they're just putting the render on top of the video, which fully occludes the blackbird.
My only dream is to one day invent something as clever and useful as this (and to produce a marketing video as succinct and informative).
It's actually less clever and useful than this makes it out to be. CG is already prevalent in car ads, so introducing a new physical rig isn't the game changer it is made out to be.
So now car ads can be even less honest than they already were.
Great.
This is super commonplace.
Look at apple's ads. Their almost all renderings. Most people don't care as it looks exactly like the real product.
No, they're mostly actual photographs by this guy: http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/8/4311868/the-illusion-of-sim...
So its hasicaly designed to lie to consumers, so that even that product ads they are seeing are completly fake.
Car ads have been using CG cars for almost 10 years now in a lot of cases, especially photos.
A lot of product ads are as well - Ikea catalogue "photos" are almost always CG renders.
CG images in IKEA catalogues are pretty recent.
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/cgsfeatures/cgsfeaturespe...
Car ads aren't fake already? Half the ads I see feature CG cars driving an endless blank whiteness or through similarly impossible landscapes.
This looks like a sweet way to shoot car scenes for movies, I wonder if it can take a roll-cage/extra safety features.
I doubt they would put this kind of rig in any form of "stunt" mode. Seems like it carries reallly really expensive gear.
Most car sites now allow the end user to customize their car with color, trim & options. I can see this being used to give the end-user a realistic view of what the car will look like.
Mass customization of cars is increasingly possible with high-end 3D printers and tech like this may allow you to insert your own idea of what your car will look like into a Hollywood style commercial.
At the end of the day, car commercials already show people drifting around corners and skidding to a stop. Realistic commercials of cars stuck in traffic isn't going to move any units.