The spot is an intense, visually stunning film, showing just how breathtaking it can be traversing Canada’s diverse terrain on two wheels.

The 60-second spot features a number of gritty environments, with a variety of bicycles speeding this way and that, some alone and some in large packs, some travelling extremely fast. There’s one catch. None of them have riders. The goal is to inspire Canadians to get active, and the spot serves up a succinct rallying cry to potential riders: “Hop On.”

Our VFX team used its talents to bring the riderless bikes to life, integrating CG with the help of crowd software. Every shot had two takes, one with bike and rider, and a close match without bike and rider. The editor kept two synchronized edits going, developing the feel with the bike and rider shots, and using the bike and riderless edit to guarantee clean shots for CG. The basis for all these, was a live action shoot where a ton of real riding and bike footage could be filmed - for final shots and for reference.We’d camera track in NUKE, generate a point cloud as dense as we could and then literally build whatever terrain or topology we needed the CG bikes to be in.

The next step was animation for the CG bikes, built in Maya, rendered with V-ray. In addition to hero shots, a few scenes also required cycling pelotons with more than 100 bikes. As mentioned we utilized the crowd software -more traditionally used for human or animal figures, it translated to multiple bicycles seamlessly. Finally, paint/roto techniques were used when performance takes were exceptional. We removed the riders, their shadows and rebuilt the backgrounds. Baselight for colour.