In the commercial TOYOTA RAV4 Deflate, directed by Bruno Aveillan, the owner of the Toyota RAV4 attains the surprising and unexpected power to deflate people, objects and the environment. The commercial starts in a high-tech office, where we can see an employee and his boss having an argument; suddenly the employee grasps the plastic valve at his boss’ neck and pulls the lid off. The boss starts deflating in a swirl just as a balloon does and so do the rest of his colleagues and furniture. Second scene: the young man is driving his Toyota RAV4, the building undergoes the same treatment as he drives by: it deflates like a plastic boat. Stuck in a traffic jam, he gets out of his car and he’s about to deflate the road and cars when another Toyota RAV4 owner, a young lady with a knowing smile, does it before him.

Deflating people, objects, buildings and cars was a genuine challenge for la maison CG team. This visual effect has seldom been used—if ever—and thus few references existed. Also, even if the technique used is the same, human beings, objects, buildings and cars do not deflate the same way and at the same speed. Therefore, the CG team had to find a specific logic for the transformation of each element.

During the shooting, nearly 1000 photos were taken by the supervisors to be reused for the textures to be mapped on the objects and on the boss; these were modelled with Softimage XSI. Starting from the photos we used photogrammetric techniques to rebuild the props and characters to be animated in CG. We had to rotoscope the movement of the boss very precisely in order to capture the textures for every frame. We then used lighting information from the set to recreate the light interaction on the CG models. We used a clothes simulation program (syflex) and keyframe animation to achieve the proper deformation.

Director: Bruno Aveillan; production company: Quad; agency: Saatchi & Saatchi, Digital Visual Effects: la maison; shooting supervisors: François Dumoulin, Bruno Maillard; graphic artists: François Dumoulin, Bruno Maillard, Eve Rambo; CG supervisor: Luc Froehlicher; CG artists: Emmanuel Chapon, Matthieu Royer, Luc Froehlicher, Pierre Pilard, Myriam Catrin, Guy Rabiller, Thomas Liebert; digital matte painting: Myriam Catrin; digital visual effects coordinator: Caroline Deloffre

Luc Froehlicher (F) has worked for over 15 years in the CGI domain and has been the head of the 3D department at la maison since its creation (2000). He now dedicates himself to movies and commercials and has won multiple awards for his work. Luc holds a PhD in Image and Graphic Processing from the University of Strasbourg and an engineering diploma from ENSAM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts et Métiers). La maison is a French based company specializing in the creation of digital visual effects for the motion picture industry: commercials, feature films, short films, television and music videos.