To demonstrate the agility, power and overall awesomeness of the new M4, we showed it doing the seemingly impossible - racing along an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean. Most cars arrive by cargo ship. The M4 comes by racetrack.

Renting an aircraft carrier and building a racetrack wasn’t an option. To maintain realism with our digital ship and racetrack, stock footage of large freighters was used with our CG Aircraft Carrier placed over the real boats. We filmed the M4 with a Russian Arm on an open tarmac to mirror the deck of the carrier. Track sections were measured precisely to fit the curves and straightaways of our carrier model.

Shots were tracked and camera motions were used to film the digital set. The M4 was roto-scoped and placed into digital backgrounds with the biggest challenge being that the lighting and reflections on the car had to match the digital environment and vice versa. So we lit our digital set to match the real world lighting from the shoot. Our digital car was used to generate shadow and reflection passes that we added on to the real M4. This was a massive amount of work since there were 52 shots. In final compositing, everything was blended seamlessly together – reflections added or taken away, the sky balanced, CG tire smoke added, digital water, flags, etc.

5 Terabytes of data. 20 visual effects artists. 400 tracking markers. 1 Ultimate Racetrack.

With the help of our video, Canada's allocation of M3 and M4 vehicles were sold out within one month. Canada became the world's second biggest seller of M vehicles on a per capita basis. "Ultimate Racetrack" became the #1 most shared automotive video globally (source ViralVideoChart.) And after only 100 hours of being in market, it was already in the top 100 most shared automotive videos of all time on Youtube.