Toyota CHR

The campaign’s hero commercial — by Exit Films’ LA-based director Ben Tricklebank — unapologetically shows off the C-HR’s slick design, technology and performance, the car gliding a young couple seamlessly from one experience to the next in a single, unbroken camera move.

That one continuous shot was the entire challenge — and almost none of what you see was real. The C-HR and every environment around it are entirely CG; only a single shot in the whole commercial has the car captured in camera.

Behind the shot

The talent were filmed against green on a motion gimbal, seated in nothing more than the car’s seats, steering wheel and dashboard. To sell a car in motion, the camera and the gimbal had to move in perfect concert — capturing exactly the right perspective on the actors so the CG world could later be built around them and match-tracked frame-for-frame onto the plate.

The hard part of a seamless move is synchronisation: the camera and the gimbal’s rotation must stay locked together, take after take, or the perspective drifts and the illusion falls apart.

The solution: an LED motion guide

To solve it, Andreas designed a bespoke LED motion-guide system and led the team that built it. Motion data was extracted directly from the previs and used to animate LED strips that acted as a live visual guide on set. The travelling light gave the camera and gimbal operators a precise, repeatable cue to follow — keeping their timing locked to the previsualised move on every take. With the practical and virtual motion synchronised, the CG car and fully digital environments dropped seamlessly onto the live-action talent.

The result is a single, flawless, seamless move — and an invisible join between the real and the entirely computer-generated.

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