PROJECT BACKGROUND

Having been a fan of the brand for over 30 years and worked for Porsche on 3 commercial campaigns over the last years, I thought what better to do for a showcase of our abilities as a brand new digital production company, then to come up with a project showcasing my favorite and iconic designs from Porsche over the last 75 years.

So when we suddenly faced the unthinkable outbreak of a global pandemic and a stay at home order that would last at least 2-3 months, I took this as a perfect opportunity to jumpstart this project. Because of a zero tolerance for even small live action shoots, we decided to try to do this entire spot without a single live action shot and to create all iconic cars and environments entirely digital. The following pages will hopefully give you a short overview of the workflow and possibilities we are capable of doing within a short turnaround and working entirely remotely and virtual. And of course we also hope you enjoy the spot :-)

OUR WORKFLOW

Since we wanted to cover at least 3-4 cars per decade and had 7 decades in total, we knew this would be a challenging undertaking in the 4 week time period we set aside for this project. So we assigned an artist to look into all available digital car models. He spent hours researching the various Porsche models from each decade and sort them by quality and relevance for our time periods. We were able to source and find about 30 existing models during this research phase. Probably half of these needed some minor work, like re-texturing or cleaning up some of their geometry.

Another challenge was of course the whole idea of creating also all environments digitally, which was an entirely different task. We handed this to another artist in order to research existing set pieces or interior and exterior models. Both artists spent about 1-2 weeks just sourcing and collecting assets, as well as preparing them for the the art direction and assembly of our final scenes for the spot. Parallel to these tasks, we started visualizing the possible setups and scenes, as well as developing the look and mood for every car. By streamlining the process - working backwards and designing the setups based upon what environments we could assemble and create in the given timeframe - we were able to shave off a great deal of time.

All in all, we had about 32 setups and cars ready for rendering after 3 weeks. In our last week we started rendering all setups in a 24/7 setup on our two inhouse GPU renderfarms. Whenever the first shots were finished rendering, we went straight into compositing and color correction. If we encountered any mistakes, we were able to correct and tweak them the same day and push these changes onto the renderfarm the same night. After about 2-3 days of trial and error we pretty much worked out our desired look and settings, so that from then on the renders came out as intended and needed very little tweaking. Parallel to rendering and compositing, we started editing the final piece together and building the sound design, as well as sourcing a fitting music track. In the end the final master was ready in 4 weeks and 3 days.