Supra’s cultural heritage takes us back to the 1980s. Since pinball-machines were hugely popular during the ‘80s, we created a commercial featuring a life-size pinball machine with Toyota Supra as the ball. A professional driver raced through the machine overcoming obstacles and scoring points without getting hit. The concept provided a nod to heritage for the fans, connected emotionally with everybody, and certainly re-established Toyota’s street cred finishing off with a line reading, “It’s back.”

Toyota has been perceived as a boring car company. The challenge was to use the Supra campaign to show people that Toyota is an exciting car brand. Back in the eighties and nineties, the Supra was one of the most sought after Japanese sports cars. A legend amongst tuners and popularized in the Fast and the Furious film. The return of the Supra was the perfect opportunity for us to develop a campaign that shows Toyota in an exciting new light. The commercial aired during the 2019 Super Bowl to celebrate the release.

The VFX vendor was involved in the project from conception to final delivery, and helped extensively with each step of the process. From the layout of the course and the design of the pinball elements, to previzing the shoot and finally putting it all together during four weeks of post-production. The artists thoroughly researched pinball machines, and translated as much as possible of that reference material into a larger-than-life race course for the new Supra car, grounding everything in reality and real world physics. The shear scale of the project, combined with the, literally, enormous size of the moving pieces and harsh shooting conditions in the New Mexican desert called not only for meticulous planning on all levels, but also mandated the use of advanced techniques such as AR visualization of the CG set, automated drone surveys, and virtual camera capture for full CG shots.