Asylum, in collaboration with ad agency Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago and @radical.media director Jeff Zwart, completed visual effects work for "Family Tree," a television spot that introduces the Porsche Panamera, the first four-seat sports car from the iconic carmaker. The elaborate, technically challenging commercial was the perfect showcase for Asylum's VFX capability.

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"Family Tree" features a collection of more than 50 classic Porsche cars accelerating across an open plain. Ever-shifting camera angles—from overhead panoramas to driver-seat views—capture the onward momentum of the pack as one car—the Panamera—weaves its way through. Interspersed with these ground-level angles is a birds-eye view of the entire collection etching tracks in the landscape to progressively create the branches of the Porsche family tree.

"Porsche is a company synonymous with excellence: they have an incredible history, universal brand recognition and extremely high-quality products. Working with C-K and @radical.media to execute this grand vision for Porsche was a real honor," notes Asylum executive producer Michael Pardee. "This project was a challenge on many different levels, but our team came together and produced something really special."

Coordinating several vehicles in 57 separate shots presented myriad challenges for Asylum. Each scene needed to be camera-tracked perfectly to provide exact camera data from which a realistic landscape would be created. The cars had to be matchmoved and rotoscoped in every shot so that the tracks in the surface and the dust could be procedurally generated from each vehicle. The tracks laid in the surface were crucial to the story, allowing viewers to see where other cars had already been and, by curving the tracks away from the pack, suggesting the direction the cars moved to form new branches, giving credibility to the end reveal—the formation of the family tree. All pre-visualizations were built to scale using satellite views of the set at El Toro Airbase to coordinate the action on the tarmac.

A realistic-looking desert plain, with tracks and dust trails from the speeding cars, had to be created in CG for the 50 live-action cars to live in. All the environments, tracks, dust and pre-vis dynamics were crafted in Side Effects Software Houdini for its scalability and procedural capabilities. Houdini's Digital Assets allowed Asylum to modify the look of the terrain, tracks and dust in a single shot, quickly propagate the changes to all shots and handle pre-composites of certain elements prior to handing them off for compositing.

Most of the shots required adding additional cars; some shots needed cars removed and replaced with CG cars. A number of different techniques were utilized to achieve this task.

Live-action cars were rotoscoped from other takes, stabilized and re-tracked into new plates. High-res photos of each car were taken and relit before being animated to create certain shots, and CG cars were modeled and animated to replace unwanted cars or to populate shots with too few Porsche models. Every car in the commercial, whether from the original shot or added digitally, was modeled and matchmoved so that there would be digital assets to generate tire tracks and dust. The cars were animated and matchmoved in Autodesk Maya software.

Asylum incorporated sun, flares, shadows, dust and tracks to each scene to balance the lighting irregularities caused by the sunup-to-sundown shooting schedule. The Paint and Roto department had the enormous task of extracting a large number of cars from their original backgrounds. The Paint team needed to remove camera vehicle reflections, tracking markers and runway markings that were either reflected in the cars or removed from their shadows. Matte paintings were created in Adobe Photoshop, with camera tracking done in Andersson Technologies SynthEyes and roto handled in Silhouette v3.4. Final compositing and integration was done on Autodesk Flame.

"To prepare for these multiple challenges, Asylum was involved in extensive pre-vis and on-set supervision, ensuring the smoothest integration of the VFX with the photography," states Asylum CG supervisor Zach Tucker. "We built a system to animate cars that included procedural systems for car dynamics and tracks being laid on the surface, allowing us to quickly visualize the number, year, make and model of cars needed in each shot. Finding the correct balance between live action and CG was tricky. The spot always had to be believable or we would have failed. Once all of the elements were created and refined, it was quite an undertaking to mold the imagery into a place that was both consistent and convincing."

"We worked closely with the director and C-K to ensure that we succeeded in achieving the look of the commercial, including which cars were showcased in which shots, and delivering a spot that convincingly told the introduction story of the newest member of the Porsche family and the heritage that inspired its creation," notes Asylum VFX supervisor Tim Davies. "The launch of the Porsche Panamera was definitely an exercise in which Asylum's expansive array of talent was utilized across each and every department. Everyone had a major role and every department delivered seamless work."