The Mill teamed up with RPA and Director Johnny Hardstaff to create ‘New Rules’ for Honda, where the transitions between characters and settings take place on a piece-by-piece basis. The spot brought together Mill talent across almost every department, resulting in a truly unique look.
Director:
Johnny Hardstaff
Production Company:
Reset
Agency:
RPA
Lead Artist and Shoot Supervisor Glyn Tebbutt comments, “The original brief was to create the effect of tiles ‘flipping’ and, in doing so, revealing a broad spectrum of people and lives, proving that anyone can drive this car.”
After chatting with Johnny about his creative vision for the piece, the team at The Mill researched and developed how the tiles could animate and work within a live-action world.
Glyn was on hand during the shoot, where both environmental and body Lidar scans were taken to assist with modeling each scene's layout.
The key to making the transitions work, says Glyn, “was to matchmove a series of performances that were scrutinized and manipulated in Flame to best match a single person’s action. This then became the force which was used to motivate the tile animation, optimizing the most amount of time that each performance would marry up.”
He continues, “After a huge amount of care was taken on set to align the plates, it was still necessary to further manipulate them and, in some cases, unify several plates into a single camera move. These scenes were then combined in CG so that the tiles would reveal the incoming environment. Each animation was carefully driven and designed to accentuate the form and motion within each scene."