Working thru prodco Friend London and agency Publicis Conseil, ManvsMachine takes the director’s chair in this complex mix of live-action and photo-real VFX for the EV reboot of the Renault 5 with post handled by Electric Theatre Collective.

Mike Sharpe, ManvsMachine CD: “We started the process with a long design phase to develop the world of the ‘maze’ as well as extensive story boarding. There were multiple versions of the film, including a teaser, so we needed to be economical with our shot list. After this we started cutting edits together using the storyboard and references, and later moved into 3D pre-vis to block out all the edits in detail.

“We then enlisted the help of VFX powerhouse Electric Theatre Collective and together we defined which shots should be achieved in-camera and which would need either additional CGI augmentation or to be fully created in CG.
 

“The first two days we were on a brutally barren concrete location on the outskirts of Madrid to shoot the car beauty shots, maze driving, and talent. The third day we shot reference for all the fully CG shots in a large hangar.”

 
“We also had a long pre-production period in Madrid scouting locations, which was doubling up for Paris (due to filming restrictions around the up-coming Olympics) and to plan the shoot which ended up being split over four days.

“The first two days we were on a brutally barren concrete location on the outskirts of Madrid to shoot the car beauty shots, maze driving, and talent. The third day we shot reference for all the fully CG shots in a large hangar, and on the final day we locked off four big streets of Madrid for the exterior driving scenes.

“Then we went into post-production, starting with a long offline process to cut a teaser and three main films. Once we had the edit lock we handed it over to ETC who started the tracking, 2D clean-up, and 3D work to create the maze and replace the car partially or fully in the live-action shots.”
 
 

 
Client: Renault

Agency: Publicis Conseil

Production: Friend London
Director: ManvsMachine
Cinematographer: Daniel Bouquet

French Production: Quad

Post/VFX: Electric Theatre Collective

Editor: Toby Heard @ Pundersons Gardens

Song: Daft Punk “Instant Crush”
Arrangement/Sound Design: Start-Rec

Toolkit: Creative Suite, Nuke, Houdini, Cinema 4D