Traditional car configurators are all the same; you go to a car manufacturers website only to be greeted with bad CG renders of cars and their features, and navigation that’s only ever as creative as a drop-down menu.

Our younger audience wants more than this. They will only play with a tool like this if it’s truly engaging, entertaining, dynamic and innovative. They’re officially rolling the dice in their own game of life. We needed to give them somewhere to create their Prius c game piece: the first video-driven car configurator created and shared a personalized Prius c through theatrical, interactive films.

With“Hum”, we wanted to tell a simple story of how one Prius model is now a family of hybrid vehicles. Through animation, we quickly traveled to all corners of the country to celebrate there now being a Prius for everyone. By combining a CG execution with traditional stop motion, we created a world that seamlessly blended both the real world and an animated world. We used Softimage XSI, and the photoreal renderer VRAY to achieve this effect.

Our process began with pages of character studies, environment sketches, and motion tests. Initially we planned to do a set build in order to give the spot a real world charm, but finding ourselves limited, we decided to challenge the mindset of a CGI workflow by giving ourselves constraints of the real world. This meant every camera move, prop, or environment that was built in the computer was based very literally on how it exists in the real world. Details like using miniature scale in our builds, creating all of the textures by hand, and giving backgrounds a traditional matte painted feel.