Maybe it’s the speed, maybe it’s the power, or maybe it’s just the ear-splitting noise, but something about tackling a new NASCAR project always inspires a lot of really interesting and fun ideas for us to dive into, and this year was no exception. We’d been poking around with the idea of showing a world from underneath for a while, said Robert Gottlieb; Fox Sports Marketing SVP/Creative Director, and Creative Director Mark Simmons had been talking with Madrid visual effects house La huella about a collaboration that would take us underground for a ten-second network ID.
The underground idea wasn’t really going to work as an ID, but we loved the concept as a possibility for our College Football package, but the College Football timeline was too tight, so Mark and La huella changed gears and started adapting the concept to NASCAR.
La Huella was asked to go further in a concept we had worked on before: the "Transparent" commercial for Metro de Madrid we did a couple of years ago, says Jérôme Debève. But although the main idea has a lot in common with that production, we quickly realized that we would face another completely different challenge. Whereas "Metro" was all about slowly contemplating existing places in Madrid, the focus in “Nascar” was creating a whole original racetrack and follows 30 fast cars chasing each other at extreme speeds, using unusual camera angles. All that in Hi-def, with a number of shots that ended in 33. That is six times the amount of shots, with four times the level of details in each picture. In a similar time frame... Thanks to our previous experiences in Spain we were confident that the shooting part would be pretty straightforward with a good previz stage; and I though that was the case, with a super-professional team that actually cared about our post-production needs. Not so common...
First, we created a story-board that allowed the FSD team to create a rough 2D animatic. That gave us a base for the shot list and an approximate duration for each. We then used basic 3D models to block animation and camera angles/moves, progressively refining the editing on Fox side and 3D layout on our side. By the time of the shooting we already had an approved animatic cut that closely matches the "director's cut" that was our base of work. I have to say we particularly appreciate the freedom Mark Simmons and the guys at Fox gave us during the whole process...Especially considering that we dealt with an authentically "American" sport very little known in Spain, so we had to somehow adapt our European perspective to create something appealing for NASCAR followers in USA.
