Clear Completes Post-Production On Phantom HD Commercial

Clear has just completed complex post-production at HD on the first ever commercial to use the 'Phantom HD' high-speed data camera.
Directed by Home Corp’s Howard Greenhalgh for VCCP, the commercial relaunches Hyundai’s three main cars: a sleek new-look coupe, a dominating 4 x 4, and the Getz – a zippy little town car.
VCCP’s brief was to show each car being born out of metal liquid, essentially the “essence of car”, a synonym for the quality that runs through every Hyundai model. The result is a breathtaking sequence of shots showing cars being formed from slow flowing metallic liquid. This was achieved by shooting model cars in giant tanks of silver paint. The Phantom HD camera, supplied by John Hadfield at Green Door Films, is currently the only available high-speed data camera that captures a true high definition image at up to 1000 frames per second, which was absolutely essential for the slo-mo nature of this particular job. The project required a massive leap of faith on the part of the Hyundai client because the camera was a prototype, so no images were available to demonstrate its amazing potential.
Clear’s head of 2D, Derek Moore, was the VFX supervisor on the three-day shoot and completed the visual effects work on Flame back in Soho. Over the course of four weeks, Moore graded and composited all shots. He made extensive use of camera tracking and morphing techniques to meld disparate shots into a fluid sequence, and used Flame’s new warper to replace most of the model cars that were used in the liquid tanks with real Hyundai models from 35mm and digital still elements.
Moore commented: “We found the most effective technique to make it look like a real car was emerging from the slo-mo liquid was to use the new warper in Flame. I would take a similar angle of the real car, then stabilise it with the warper. This left me with a static car but with moving lights and shadows. Then I tracked this over the top of the model car, shot with the HD Phantom, and restored the liquid over the top of that. It was quite a bit of work, but I guess it was cheaper that writing off a fleet of Hyundais by driving them into gallons of silver paint.”
Moore added: “One of the biggest challenges we faced was the amount of data the HD Phantom produced. By the time we had collated all the footage we had over two terabytes of data. That is as much as we would expect for a feature film! It pushed our storage and networking to the limit. In fact we had to install the very latest Flame suites from Autodesk in order to get the project done on time.”
Home Corp’s director Howard Greenhalgh was chosen for the piece because of his visual style and extensive experience with high-speed photography. Howard Greenhalgh said: “The Phantom HD is a huge improvement on the previous Phantom cameras. It is currently the only high-speed data camera that captures a true high definition image at up to 1000 frames per second. It also has amazing colour depth and clarity, the like of which I haven’t seen before.”
(DS)