Working with lead artists David Whittle and Sainty (Henry St. Leger), who are known as street artists, directors Ben Foley and Chris Hopewell created a 30 second television commercial for Acura called Wall Art in which the car is shown in an animated environment.
What you might assume at first to be CGI, compositing the car image into cartoon drawings done on paper or in a computer graphics program and composited together in the usual computer special effects suites, is instead a completely different approach, in which the images themselves are drawn, life size, on huge 60′ x 40′ (18m x 12m) canvases.
The canvases were drawn, painted over and redrawn, as if they were enormous animation cell backgrounds, and other elements were drawn on the floor and even on the car itself, animating a life-size driver and the images of birds as seen from above against the car.
Even the apparent turn of a corner that goes by at one point is hand drawn animation. All of the apparent motion is in the drawn animations and the position of the camera. The car never moves.
(It brings to mind the remarkable MUTO wall animation I wrote about in March.)
The Acura Wall Art shoot took 17 painters and 240 hours of shooting over ten days. There is a “making of” video on the t5m.com site, that includes the final 30 second spot at the end.
