Award winning Digital Domain Producer Chris Fieldhouse was in a tight position when all his Houdini artists were still tied up on on another VFX heavy commercial and could not roll over to a Mazda spot requiring heavy fluids and dynamics. Chris and I had spoken several times over the last two years and when he called us to see if this was something we could handle, we jumped at the opportunity to flex our 3d muscles. DD's original animatic showed clearly what some of the issues were going to be technically, but there also seemed to be a need for designing the look of paint mortar hits and getting the right consistency in the paint spraying out of the plane. After showing some other fluid and dynamics work we had done as well as putting together a quick test for VFX Supervisor Jay Barton, Chris and Jay felt comfortable moving forward and letting us handle 14 shots on this spot.

Jay and I quickly developed a vernacular for the look of paint spray based on reference images of airplane firefighting water tankers common in California. There were three essential systems we had to develop, the choreographed motion of the paint hoses the women were spraying with, the paint explosions from the mortar hits and lastly the paint spray coming from the plane. While the paint hoses held by the girls was fairly straight-forward, choreographing those motions in the specific arcs the agency wanted was a bit more challenging. The explosions were a tremendous amount of fun and we developed a whole library of looks with various falling tendrils of paint. Jay Barton suggested that to this we add an exploding ring at the skirt of the explosion which really brought it together visually. But the plane spray shots were the big heavies. Requiring long simulation times and powerful boxes, we built out a street set and literally flooded it from above, to the point where we had liquid flowing down the ramp and entering the tunnel. On all the shots as we didn't know the exact edit points yet, we ran the animations much longer than needed. So it was really fun to flood the tunnel and we were sad to see some of the coolest looking stuff didn't make it into the final cut. Nevertheless the final spot looks great and the collaboration was a great experience.