Commercial break

The Chimney Pot put together a 60-second commercial for the Grand Prix that was staged in Bahrain last month. We take a look at how the team post produced the TVC.

Sweden-headquartered post-production house, The Chimney Pot, which recently opened a facility in Dubai, put together a 60-second commercial for the Grand Prix in Bahrain.

The commercial, which was developed in part from footage shot in Bahrain by production house, Filmworks and in part from 3D models of racing cars built in Chimney Pot's Dubai facility, begins with a range of stunning visuals of trees, hair and the vast desert landscape coming alive as a silver lining zips past, and slowly the excitement is built up through both sound and image until the viewer sees the Formula One cars competing on the race track.

The advertisement evokes all of the excitement of a Formula One race while also creating a strong Middle Eastern flavour.

Director & editor, Mauro Salesi edited the footage that was shot in Bahrain. With a locked-off edit, the online crew then had the task of grading, rotoscoping, compositing and matte painting numerous complex shots.

Alongside this, the 3D team at The Chimney Pot modeled three Formula One cars in Maya from scratch. After finalising artworks and textures, the team tracked the shots with a Boujou and PFTrack.

They then animated the cars with procedural techniques, lit up the scene and rendered the shots in different passes. This was then incorporated into the treated live footage, and the commercial was brought to life.

"The Formula One cars change every season so there was no way we were going to have access to the real ones, which were being used in other races," says Viktor Björk, managing director, The Chimney Pot, Dubai.

"However, the Formula One web site is full of good images of the cars. Based on these, we developed the cars in 3D on Maya. This was the important part of the job. We also modeled the cars with techniques so that the suspension and weight of the car would change according to how the surfaces under them moved."

The original footage included a scene of the track with billboards, cranes and ordinary cars driving on it.

"In 3D space, we created a big road on top of the road in the footage so that we could place the cars on them and track how they would move on them. The billboards and the crane were cleaned out. Several layers were put in to achieve the final result," explains Björk.

This project took 20 days to do and is one of the bigger projects The Chimney Pot has taken on since it began full-fledged operations early this year, says Björk.