From the August 2020 issue of Car and Driver.
How do you film a commercial for a car you don’t have? Ben Smith, the executive creative director for visual-effects company The Mill, encountered just that problem while working on an ad for the seventh-gen Chevrolet Corvette. With the real car unavailable, he improvised by shooting a C6 covered in LED markers. In post, CGI animators then used those markers as reference points to “reskin” the car to make it look like the C7. Though it never aired, the final product was flawless, and Smith got to thinking: What if we could streamline production by building something that animators could manipulate to look like any car they wanted?
To make that idea a reality, Smith enlisted the help of special-effects company J.E.M. F/X and film-equipment providers Performance Filmworks and Keslow. All three companies had collaborated with The Mill on the Corvette shoot and have experience making bespoke camera rigs. After two years of development, the team unveiled the Blackbird, a transformable vehicle frame that the studio could shoot whenever, wherever, and then turn into a photoreal car via CGI.
The Mill
Made in the Burbank, California, building where the supersonic reconnaissance plane of the same name was built, the Blackbird is more chameleon than bird. With an adjustable single-seat chassis, it can change its length by four feet and its width by 10 inches. The studio can swap out the wheels and alter the suspension to match the ride height and driving characteristics of a wide range of vehicles. Instead of borrowing a gas or diesel engine from an automaker, the roughly 3500-pound Blackbird has an electric powertrain that’s powerful enough to mimic the power-to-weight ratio of most cars. The Blackbird can also film itself thanks to a top-mounted four-camera array and lidar scanner.
The rig’s chief downside is the arduous process of stitching together the images from its four cameras. So The Mill et al. went back to the drawing board and came up with a simpler single-camera setup for version 2.0 and a chassis that more credibly imitates SUVs. The goal is for the Blackbird to eventually become as cheap and accessible as roof-mounted camera cranes are now and for its applications to evolve to include feature films and automotive design development. Which is to say, it has the potential to be the rarest of all birds: the no-compromise car.
The Mill
Cameo Appearances
Mismatched engine noises aren’t the only illusion in advertising. In addition to making film production simpler, the Blackbird is one solution for companies that want to launch their products with big TV spots but don’t want to expose their new cars by shooting them on public roads before the unveiling.
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