Renault 'The Race'

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

A dozen ghostly cars rise from their scrap heap graveyard and speed through a city. Their mission? To find a particular 'live' host car that they might possess, and so live again. The car they seek is a Renault Clio, and the phantom fleet is the result of an intensive eight weeks post-production at Framestore.

Directed by Dom & Nic, and produced by Outsider (UK) and Bandits (France) for Publicis Paris, Renault The Race is the latest fruit of the astonishing ongoing collaboration between one of the UK's top commercials directing teams and Framestore. The spot is currently airing in France and Germany – with variant endings customised for each country.

The raw material for the spot was gathered during an eight-day shoot in Budapest, supervised by Framestore's Mike McGee. "We shot all over the city using a variety of techniques," he says, "Including a miniature remote controlled helicopter. The scrap yard was tricky, as real car scrap yards contained recognizable brands of vehicles, and the brief was sensitive to the fact that other manufacturers might not like to see 'ghosts' of their cars."

The issue of non-real cars was an important one, as it meant that Framestore had to effectively design all twelve vehicles. In addition to this, the look that the directors were seeking for the ghosts involved a semi-transparent appearance. So it was necessary for each car to have built its complete interior workings, down to the engines and suspensions. So the 3D team had to create multi-layered, fully animated models. As Mark Wilson, the Senior Technical Director who led the Framestore 3D team says, "The problem was that with all the car elements, plus four or five layers of effects – the ghostly vapour trails and so on – on shots involving all 12 cars you could end up with 150 layers to comp."

The complexity and sheer processing demands of the spot meant that the compositors were under huge pressure. Fortunately for Inferno Artists Avtar Bains and Jonathan Hairman, Framestore was able to bring on board a team of Shake artists to help out. It's reassuring to have that sort of firepower available, when necessary.

With a beautiful and sympathetic Telecine by Dave Ludlam in the Framestore Spirit 4K suite, the end result is a sort of delirious cross between a stock car race and Ghostbusters – fast, funny, and…er..spirited.