Corolla GR : Metalmorphosis

Toyota Corolla GR - Metalmorphosis

This was one of those rare briefs that come across your desk and make you drop everything. It was somewhat ambiguous ‘use the all new Corolla GR to bring animations to life around a racetrack, oh and also let’s do it all in camera’. There was a reference video that some kids had made of an animated dancing bear, they had printed a frame sequence and pasted it down the wall of a tunnel and filmed from their iphone as they rode past on their bicycle. I thought to myself, “If these kids could do it surely I, a professional, could figure it out''.

After delving back into high school physics and banging my head against a wall for a few days, it turns out that the basic principle wasn’t too difficult. All we needed to do was synchronise the frame rate of the camera to the spacing of the animation cells pasted around the track. BUT… when you’re in a sports car travelling close to 100kmh, things start to get a little more difficult.

The real challenge came when we started building things to scale. We have a sports car, we want to film it moving fast, the faster we went, the bigger the animation sequences needed to be. For example, sequence 1 is 12 seconds long, thats 300 frames, each frame was 1m apart, so that section alone was 300m in length. We had 5 animation sequences.

Then there was the challenges with the camera. Filming a wall perpendicular from a car travelling at 90kmh means blurry imagery. We needed to find a camera that not only had a global shutter to prevent shutter roll, but it also had to be able to shoot at an extremely tight shutter angle to prevent a blurry frame. The list of challenges went on.

The final film stretched almost every bit of my film craft knowledge and the bits I didn’t know were picked up from our amazing team. The result is a 2min action film of an awesome hot hatch belting around an abandoned racetrack. We reveal hidden animations on its journey, tapping into the Toyota GR heritage and eventually merging the world between driver and machine.