The Briefing Room

For the most part, great creative doesn’t fall out of the sky. “Air Raid,” created for PlayStation 3 via Deutsch, is the exception to that rule - artistically and literally. The artists at Eight VFX lent their talents to the spot, which was directed by Klaus Obermeyer and depicts a group of badass sky-divers parachuting from an airplane behind the wheels of their race cars and dirt bikes.

The bold, eye-popping ad was shot on location at the Salton Sea, where stunt drivers/fliers were dropped from real airplanes, with sky-diving cameramen capturing the action.

“Our mission was to synchronize the sky-divers and their drops so they would appear closer together than was the case in camera,” explained Executive Producer Baptiste Andrieux of Eight VFX, which previously collaborated with Obermeyer on 2007’s Bank of America “Hiker”. “To do so practically would have taken the stunts to an impractical level.”

Of course, “Air Raid” is an ad for PS3’s Motorstorm 2, and as such it needed to convey a sense of the impractical while maintaining the visual authenticity of stunts executed by some of the best sky-divers in the world. To heighten the drama (no pun intended), Eight VFX created CG envinronments, airplanes, motor vehicles, and jumpers to populate the shots on top of the live action stuntmen.

“When we took this on, we said we’d be happy if this played as something that looks completely real but feels like it could and should only happen in a videogame,” said Andrieux. “Watching the spot unfold, I think we succeeded.”

Client: PlayStation 3/Motorstorm 2

Title: “Air Raid”

Airdate: 10/17/08

Agency: Deutsch

Production: Aero Films

Director: Klaus Obermeyer

EP: Lance O’Connor

Post/VFX: Eight VFX

VFX Supervisor: Jean-Marc Demmer

VFX EP: Baptiste Andrieux

VFX Producer: Marsi Frey

VFX AD: Yann Mallard

Head of CG: Fred Hopp

Animator: Yvain Gnabro

CG artists: Shuichi Nakahara, Mathias Jourdes, Chien-I Kao, Julien Forest

Compositors: Nicolas Cadorette Vigneau, Joe Chiao