American Cinematographer - August 1999 - 93

Digital Driving and Amoral Antics
Digital Domain's

Heavy Metal Roadster
by Stephanie Argy

CG Pontiac

Grand Am takes
mountain
of virtual metal.
on a

In two

new

commercials, the

Pontiac Grand Am
car races

through

surreal all-metal environments: in the
first spot, it's a shiny, modern city, and in
the second, a desert scene made up

entirely of metallic objects. Though the
images look as though they were shot on
film, all of the objects onscreen - the
car and its surroundings - were actu¬
ally created entirely in a computer by
artists at the Digital Domain visual
effects facility.
Ray Giarratana, the Digital
Domain visual effects supervisor who
directed the two spots, says advertising
agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles
(DMB&B) wanted to portray the car as a
tough vehicle that's able to handle all

how to

bring it to life. "I think by the time

sorts of environments. While the ad

ratana. "How on earth are you

executives

show

think, by far, the biggest challenge was
just getting enough richness of detail,"
says Giarratana. "We designed dozens
of buildings and lots of road textures,
and they all had to be done in metal. We
didn't want it to end up looking like a big
metal junkyard."
Even though everything in the
spot was computer-generated and never
existed in the real world (save for one

with the concept of
all-metal world, they were not sure
came

up

an

going to

environment that doesn't

even

exist?"
Giarratana

toyed with the idea of

a real car and compositing it
miniature or computer-generated

shooting
into

a

landscape, but he foresaw too many
technical problems, such as tracking and
getting reflections to work right. "It was
getting obvious that it was going to be a
lot of work, and that it would be very a

brief interior shot of

painful process," he

the

says.
Over the last few years,

though,
Digital Domain has done a number of
commercials in which digital cars have
been created and inserted into real

photography, and Giarratana thought

Images

digital

artists spent nearly four months creating
the car and its synthetic environment. "I

an

Doiocgmautirfntle.sy

Windows NT, a team of 15 to 20

were talking with us, they were in
limbo about how to do it," says Giar¬

they

that the best solution for the Pontiac spot
would be to combine a digital car with a

digital environment. "That was the right
answer," he says. "It just solved so many
other problems."
Primarily using Lightwave soft¬
ware on DEC Alpha computers running

a

woman's hands

on

steering wheel), Giarratana brought
in a cinematographer to consult on the
project: Bill Bennett, a car-commercial
expert who had been involved with some
of Digital Domain's other CG car spots.
Bennett says he had several
meetings before Digital Domain even
started on the spot. "They began to real¬
ize that there's
meets the

more

eye,"

to

says

lighting

cars

than

Bennett. "A cine¬

matographer's eye is useful, whether
you're lighting in the real world or in the
virtual world."

American

Cinematographer 89
American Cinematographer - August 1999

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