As a pair of total-immersion 60-second blasts of high-def compositing, "Teleporter" and "3D Artist" will take some beating. Unleashing Toyota USA's new Scion tC sportscar line in a frenzy of water, electricity and extreme racing, they take you inside the head of a games developer and a quantum physicist and dump you breathless. Each simulates a visually arresting video game, but while one was all CGI, the other was done almost completely in-camera.

The term "intense" not only applies to the end result, it also sums up the three-and-a-half-month production schedule that ATTIK, SF, creative director Simon Needham says could easily have been a month longer. It was a timely job for Sydney SFX design house Ambience, which had just upgraded its visual effects and editing systems, installing HD flame and smoke software. Without these additional capabilities, a project that went "far beyond the norm" would have been unachievable in the given time frame, says Ambience general manager Peter Davies.

The brief was to push the boundaries already set on a previous Scion commercial, "Transformer". Needham had decided to keep each of the two new spots separate to guard against cross-contamination of styles and ideas, and so senior compositor Marcus Bolton and animator Kevin Blom were the only two Ambience 3D experts to straddle both teams.

The toughest rendering challenge was presented by "3D Artist", a CGI project meant to visualize, in Needham's words, "the best car racing game we could think of." The only live-action shot was the car's interior. The rest of the commercial involved a computer-generated multi-level "racetrack" set against an apocalyptic cityscape.

Ambience creative director Garry Jacques recalls the hours spent designing templates and storyboards before the job was passed into 3D. "There were almost daily meetings with both the team and the client on how things could be pushed further in any given shot." Matching the content with Scion's target market - early 20s, male - was essential. As a result, "that particular spot's a little more fast and furious," says Needham. "The shots are quicker, the edits are quicker."

At the other end of the spectrum, "Teleporter" was scarcely less complex, despite being shot mainly in-camera in Melbourne. The spot shows a vehicle slipping between time in a stark, futuristic city. The night shoots used a motion capture rig and multi-speed cameras, and the images were fed back onto Bolton's laptop for compositing with previous material using combustion software: "a boon because we could check timing, the position of the car and camera angles," notes Bolton. "We could see what we were getting and the director ended up looking to us for confirmation of each shot."

Many of the 3D effects on "Teleporter" - which called for jolts of electricity to spark off the car whenever it fast-forwarded through time - had to wait until the shoot had been completed and the edit cut. Thanks to the animatics and pre-visuals, Dupear (who helmed both spots) had a good understanding of the creative's focus. Most designs were signed off well before the shoot, says Jacques. But "there were so many tweaks and styles that we incorporated into it once we had the footage in our hands, which was really the only way a job like this can be pulled off."

Nobody underestimates the intensity of the experience, Bolton says. He remembers feeling that the reputation of the Sydney VFX market was resting on Ambience's shoulders. "The greatest challenge was to deliver to the client's expectations."

Needham feels you can never do enough prep, particularly when the project is so weighted in post, while Jacques says the biggest hurdle was herding the necessarily large team of 3D freelancers and finding enough workstations. In addition, the unique nature of the project meant that everyone gave "110%" creative effort. Personal lives were put on hold.

Was it worth it? According to Jacques, it's always worth it. "We'd all be working in factories if we wanted regular lives."

CREDITS

Agency: ATTIK, SF

Creative Director: Simon Needham

Director: Rob Dupear

Effects House: Ambience, Sydney

Senior Compositor/VFX Supervisor: Marcus Bolton

Offline Editor: David Clarke

Executive Producer: Peter Davies

3D Animator: Kevin Blom

Music/Sound Design: Human, Sydney/NY

On "3D Artist" only:

Ambience Creative Director: Simon Morrison

Concept Artist/Designer: Morten Rowley

Senior Compositor: Zelco Dejanozic

3D Leads: Shaun Schellings, David Henderson, Peter Reynolds

Producer: Mandy Fanning

On "Teleporter" only:

Ambience CDs: Garry Jacques, David Park

Compositors: Roger Bolton, James Rose

Lead 3D Animator: Dean Ervik

3D Animators: Llaszlo Kiss, Bertrand Ong, Priyadarshi Sharma, Andreas Wanda

2D Matte Painter: Daniel Cox

Post Producer: Kara McCombe

ATTIK> www.attik.com

Ambience> www.ambienceentertainment.com