alter ego and Grip team up for the fourth time to illustrate Acura’s precision in parts and service. The original brief was to have our Acura mechanic in a white seamless world and only have the specific car part floating in space for the mechanic to interact with. Eric Whipp suggested that we create a stripped-down CG representation of our service bay. Nothing too detailed, just elements that felt more graphic. The symmetrical lights hanging from the ceiling, the grid patterned windows along the wall, and the long work counter that spanned the entire length of the service bay. This immediately elevated the spot, grounded our Acura service employee into an environment and helped with the transition back to reality. It also increased our need to be extremely organized for our shoot because using green screen was not an option.

“On set we had to keep reminding ourselves that 75 percent of the commercial would be in the white CG world. I would get caught up in seeing the lighting grid and crew in the reflections of the car. Then Eric would remind me that the car won’t be in the final shot” says David Whiteson

During the tech scout CG supervisor Gene Dreitser took a photo survey of the entire service bay so that he could accurately recreate our CG world with the correct spatial dimensions.

“It was an incredibly fast turnaround. We had our editor David Findlay cutting on set so that we could have a locked edit by the end of the day. We began match moving and rotoscoping right away and successfully delivered the first spot less than 2 weeks later” says Gene Dreitser.

The end result is great combination of all of alter ego’s disciplines. Production, Design and Post.