Detroit Electric – SP01

We were approached by Ground Control to make this full 3D film for the launch of Detroit Electric’s new sports car, the SP01.

One of the initial tasks was taking the concept images and style frames and developing a look in CGI that worked for the film. We liaised with director Laurent Barthelemy in California to research different techniques to create electric arcs, pulses, sparks and so on. We had a rough story guideline from which to start creating camera moves and previsualize shots, then used to create an animatic. This would be tweaked and refined throughout the production, as we developed the electricity effects.
Meanwhile we cleaned up the CAD data of the car, and extracted various elements of the geometry to be used for particle emission and impacts.

The R&D on this project was a lot of fun, but sometimes also very challenging, with complex simulations that needed to be flexible enough to be art directed so as to fulfill the creative brief and the director’s vision – which would itself evolve during the course of the production.

There was a large number of passes generated for the compositing, and since the look was being constantly tweaked and developed at both the 3D and 2D stages it was important to keep all these live, which  meant that our renderfarm was busy not just on 3D renders but also on processing Nuke scripts.

Below you can see a breakdown of some of the shots: