We start this film with the previous multi-award winning Hyundai i30 falling through the sky from a great height. Restrained and poetic, we pay homage to the silver car while it plummets towards certain destruction. It smashes into the ground with a spectacular impact, creating a huge plume of dust. From out of this dust cloud the new model i30 dramatically emerges. An announcer asks “What do you do after you’ve won Australia’s Best Car’s Award 6 times? You start again.” A new red i30 then drives out of frame and heads across the desert. The film ends with a super, which reads “Reinvented i30. Never Rest.”

For this commercial we choose to create a detailed animatic / pre-viz which from the outset made for a more streamlined production process. For the falling car it's about a 50/50 split between real car vs CG car with a couple of shots being a blend of real and CG car in the same shot. After the stunning moment of impact the in-camera shots were then tuned extensively in compositing with subtle assistance from the CG department. Rather than grading footage in one big session we opted to grade in Flame allowing us to constantly adjust the look in line with the evolution of the vfx. Initial colour tests were carried out with the director as a conceptual reference and then applied to every shot as the final composites were completed, resulting in a beautiful overall finish.

The challenge creatively was to make the falling car and dust cloud authentic. We wanted to ensure the falling car didn’t feel as though it was a CG sequence so to achieve that we shot as many angles of the car as possible, dangling from a crane with natural movement in natural light. This was all achieved at the actual location and we then combined with live action skydiving footage so that composited footage was comprised of real car footage and the true environment. Shooting the in camera dust clouds for the impact shot was a challenge when working with the elements. The schedule was extremely tight so we only had one opportunity to get this right and fortunately the weather played ball and we were able to shoot with blue skies and no wind to capture these with multiple cameras of the cloud in its entirety.