Honda Civic 'Spark'

Martin Krejci, Stink, brought his latest production for W+K and Honda to Framestore, tasking the VFX team with one of their hardest challenges to date.

The ad created by Chris Groom and Sam Heath, uses a spark to tell the four-year long story of the Honda Civic’s ninth redesign. Shot in Iceland and Prague, we witness the fledgling spark’s birth and follow its spectacular journey through dramatic landscapes (and a few familiar cogs) until it explodes into a fully formed idea... the Civic itself.

“This was a difficult conceptual production for us,” explains Framestore’s VFX Supervisor, Jonathan Hairman. “It’s pretty difficult to take an abstract entity with no potential for a face or body and yet give it enough personality to make it the central protagonist for an epic story. We set ourselves some pretty strict rules as to what the spark couldn’t look like – nothing too cute or Pixar-like, it couldn’t come across as magic dust or sci-fi. What we didn’t have, however, was a list of what the spark should look like! This posed a massive design challenge... which only made the job more satisfying.”

Martin Krejci wanted to base the spark, as much as possible, on live action. So he worked closely with VFX supervisor, Tom Sparks. He advised the production team and its special effects unit on how to develop rigs that would allow pyrotechnic elements to be filmed in a way that would enable the live action elements to be animated further afterwards. This approach sufficed for the interior shots but as soon as the spark emerges into the outside world, a new technique was required due to the further technical demands of scale and movement.

Jonathan Hairman, Alex Thomas and Johnny Han devised a unique and detailed look which combined a clever mixture of CGI and live action elements, experimenting with the balance between live-action spark footage and visual effects. Johnny Han, VFX Supervisor CGI added, “We went through an extensive look dev process to exactly replicate the live action spark. A lot happens when a flash of light is slowed to 1000fps. It becomes beautiful streams of gas and heat combust into moments of crisp detailed clouds of light. Once we were able to match this in 3d, we took it further to create the big sparks, mixing together an array of techniques - particles, fluids and live action textures”

The light cast on the landscapes was shot by Martin who filmed lighting interaction reference from a helicopter that dragged a real flare through the location. The real light interaction was removed and then slipped to line up with the Sparks once their paths over the various landscapes was locked down.