Set to Passion Pit’s “Little Secrets” track, the spot sets a sunny, high-energy vibe where the Pixi is the center of the social universe. The sleek device holds center screen throughout and is shot from the user’s perspective, instantly changing its function and look to serve each hipster who grasps and shares it. The motion is continual and perfectly beat-timed, as the Pixi rotates, orients vertically and horizontally, and flips between personalized cases, cheerfully adapting to each user’s fancy. Texting, watching video, making calls, sharing photos, navigating with a GPS – there’s no mistaking that the Pixi is a device to be enjoyed. There’s not a briefcase in sight.

To keep the action focused on the Pixi, the spot was shot with the device tethered into place by a rig, with the actors shot from the point of view of the current user, at the same time. While this approach helped the Snorri Brothers create a highly personal perspective, it also left them with some fairly complex rig removal challenges.

It was there that Brickyard lent its handiwork. Since the Pixi was at the center of every shot, so was the rig. Removing it, however, meant that parts of the hands holding the Pixi, which were shown front and center, would need to be recreated for many shots. Brickyard VFX Supervisor Geoff McAuliffe and his team used reference photos and shot HD footage of hands to re-create seamlessly.

source Brickyard VFX

Family Tree features a stampede of over 50 classic Porsche cars accelerating across an open plain. Ever-shifting camera angles – from overhead panoramas to driver-seat views – capture the onward momentum of the pack as one car – the Panamera – weaves its way through. Interspersed with these ground-level angles is a birds-eye view of the entire collection etching tracks in the landscape to progressively create the branches of the Porsche family tree.

“Porsche is a company synonymous with excellence: they have an incredible history, universal brand recognition and extremely high-quality products. Working with C-K and @RadicalMedia to execute this grand vision for Porsche was a real honor,” noted Asylum EP Michael Pardee. “This project was a challenge on many different levels, but our team came together and produced something really special.”

Coordinating several vehicles in 57 separate shots presented a myriad of challenges for Asylum. Each scene needed to be camera tracked perfectly to provide exact camera data to create a realistic landscape. The cars had to be matchmoved and roto’d in every shot so that the tracks in the surface and the dust could be procedurally generated from each vehicle. The tracks laid in the surface were crucial to the story, allowing us to see where other cars had already been and, by curving the tracks away from the pack, suggesting the direction the cars moved to form new branches, giving credibility to the end reveal – the formation of the family tree. All previs were done to scale using satellite views of the set at El Toro Airbase to coordinate the action on the tarmac.

A realistic-looking desert plain, with tracks and dust trails from the speeding cars, had to be created in CG for the 50 live-action cars to live in. All the environments, tracks, dust and previs dynamics were done in Houdini for its scalability and procedural capabilities. Houdini’s Digital Assets allowed Asylum to modify the look of the terrain, tracks and dust in a single shot, quickly propagate the changes to all shots and handle pre-composites of certain elements prior to handing them off for compositing.

Most of the shots required adding additional cars and some needed cars removed and replaced with CG cars. A number of different techniques were utilized to achieve this task.

Live-action cars were roto’d from other takes, stabilized and retracked into new plates. Hi-res photos of each car were taken and relit before being animated to create certain shots and CG cars were modeled and animated to replace unwanted cars or to populate shots with too few Porsche models. Every car in the commercial, irrespective of being from the original shoot or being added digitally, was modeled and matchmoved so we had digital assets to generate tire tracks and dust. Animation and matchmoving the cars was done using Maya software.

Source: Asylum