There was an article in a recent edition of Creative Review about the making of the floating cars Mondeo ad - I'll look in my back issues and try to dig it out.
They did actually make some out of carbon fibre so that they could be lifted by balloons.
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Soupytwist !
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This is a summary of an interview with Mark Mason the Special Effects Supervisor on the Mondeo ad, he works for a company called Asylum, which appears in the June 2007 edition of Creative Review.
The idea for outmoded cars floating away was dreamt up by the ad agency. The most obvious solution to cars floating away would be to lift the cars on cranes and take out the wires in post production. They decided that this would work with some shots but others needed actual balloons to lift actual cars. Each car was individually designed.
Three crane cars were made - a small 2 door, a saloon and a 4x4. They bought a donor car for each model and then cut it up, changed the bodywork to match the designs by welding body panels back on and using loads of filler. They were then primed and painted. New lights, body trim, wipers, badges, mirrors were made to the production designer's specifications. They also repainted the crane cars half way through the shoot so that they could be used for other shots.
They also made 3 carbon fibre cars a small 2 door, a saloon and an estate. Again they bought three donor cars which were modified to the designs and moulded in fibreglass. Once the moulds had cured, they were removed from the cars and pre-impregnated carbon fibre was laid into the moulds. Structural foam was added in some areas to increase strength. After a day in the oven to set the carbon fibre the mould was removed leaving the black shell duplicate of the original car. The shells were finished off by hand and then painted.
The windows were done using a fabric gauze as plastic or Perspex would have been to heavy. Reflections were added in post production. The target weight for the small 2 door was 25kg and 40kg for the estate.
They decided to have balloons made containing 11 cubic metres of helium, made from polyurethane no more than 0.2mm
Finally they created a helium filled car that would float on its own. This was done by vac forming Styrofoam over tools machined by Computer Numeric Control to designs drawn up in Cinema 4D. The car parts were glued together and a foil bag to hold the helium was fitted inside the car - this one weighed only 4.5kg
The shoot took ten days, including four days over two weekends in various London locations. They contacted the CAA and on their advice had safety valves fitted to the lifting balloons so they would deflate if they reached a certain height.
Asylulm put 14,000 man hours into this - they had 7 weeks before the shoot and were working on cars in their workshops as the shoot was progressing. Cars required on set at 8am were generally finished at 4am that day. They had around 30 people working on the cars and 10 more just doing the carbon fibre.
The real cars left at the end of the shoot will be recycled for materials, the others will be stored in case they can be used for something else.
There's a great picture in the article of one of the cars and its balloons stuck up a tree.
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Soupytwist !
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Just watched the ad on Ford's site. Realised I have actually seen it in the telly without realising what the ad was about. Well you could hardly say that about the Skoda Fabia ad could you ?
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