Mazda 6/CX5 commercial Art Direction

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Platon Infante's art direction

for Mazda 6 commercial

Miguel Ivanov agency assured Mazda client to make everything truthfully. That's why we've used 500 m2 of LED panels with animation in order to create real reflection on the car for a new TV commercials for the Mazda 6 and CX5!

Platon Infante was invited in position of an Art Director of graphic animation and all LED content

My objectives were as follows:

1. to create an original visual style

2. to produce graphic animations that are well reflected

3. to model all scenes from storyboard for better understanding and organizing shooting process

4. to provide the ability to combine content on shooting

The style I was looking for was about something aggressive, urbanized, but not without finesse. The brief from our Creative Director Miguel Ivanov sounded: "It has to be like racing lollipop."

The storyboard presented several visual themes, and it was not easy to combine abstract shapes with Monroe, kendo fighter and the earth planet. The decision was to make main color palette and motion transitions.

My main interest was the abstract shape theme, which had to be both the environment and "alter ego" of the machine.

For the Awakening scene I used sine-form lines, and polygonal shapes with straight lines for the theme of speed and power.

The specifics was to make such abstract shapes, which would be fine looking not only by themselves on the background, but mostly as a reflection which emphasizes the shape of a car. I was surprised when a good shape would become somewhat vague being reflected on a car surface. I must have resembled Perseus, who was supposed to look at Medusa's had only through the reflection.

I have developed a color grid, which helped us to coordinate the image on the reflection.

Every shooting scene from storyboard was modeled in Cinema 4D and rendered with physical render. It helped a lot the production designer Dennis Lischenko (whom I thank for inviting me to take part in the project!) to develop a fixed set of the LED panels for two days long shooting in the biggest shooting pavilion in Eastern Europe.

For modeling and animation I turned to the Russian team Playd, which works well with abstract shapes and 3D. Also they helped me with visual researching using "4D cinema" technics. Kendo and the planet was produced by other two talented professionals Alexey Brin and Dmitry Istomin.

Do you think that 500 m2 of LED panels was enough? We needed more, but it was not possible to gain it. So I suggested to shoot the static car with dynamic background and reflections in some cases and it looked rather authentic.

Our director/DOP Sebastian Weiland wanted to leave an ability for free camera movement. That's why we needed background animation, which is good at any angle without losing 3d feeling. In the scene of the night city, for instance, we used the parallax effect, which worked nice. Sebastien had also asked me to be able to combine and choose the content during the shooting so we have rendered some variants with layers.

I provided some finishing works right on the spot and we’ve spent two days of shooting surrounded by the totally sparkling environment. Тhat was absolutely unforgettable!

Check out my backstage video below!