Director/CG artist Shane Griffin gives Stash fans a peek into the creative and technical challenges his team at GRIF studio in Miami faced in the creation of this stand-out launch film for the Acura ADX.

Shane Griffin: “MullenLowe approached us with an ambitious idea to craft a journey for the new Acura ADX through multiple surrealist worlds, each one reflecting a selling point of the car, referencing Culture, Fun, Technology, and Performance.

“Each world had its own mood and treatment of the car, so from a motion design perspective this was a great challenge and required us to think about unique lighting, movements, FX, and environments for each section, while also having them cohesively sit together as a final piece with a distinct color palette.
 

“We loaded the entire CAD file into TyFlow to achieve the blow-apart effect, so no proxies or reference models could be used, this was time intensive, with huge file sizes, but ultimately worth it.”

 
“The main challenge was the density and detail of the vehicle CAD model and adapting that for all the fun FX we developed. From VDB sims, to tech blow-aparts, to wind tunnels and pyro sims, each sim involved using the CAD data, so we had to invent new workflows as we were adapting and experimenting.

“For example, we loaded the entire CAD file into TyFlow to achieve the blow-apart effect, so no proxies or reference models could be used, this was time intensive, with huge file sizes, but ultimately worth it.

“We also used a combo of different pyro techniques to achieve the wind tunnel and turn burnout. For the wind tunnel, we settled on using Embergen to simulate the wind, as it gave us near real-time feedback to craft the fine details with precision. Everything was rendered with Maxon Redshift.”

Watch the process reel:

 
 

 
Client: Acura

Agency: MullenLowe LA

Production: GRIF studio
Team: Shane Griffin, Mohamed Hejair, Nayan Bodawala

Music/sound design: Source Sound