Continuing with the existing concept of a 'truckload of cash', the challenge for the Fire Horse team was to go BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER and MORE. The task for Fire Horse was to create a heavily laden truck, full of cash, powering it's way down the road somewhere in the NSW outback, on it's way to deliver it's payload to a lucky lotteries player.

While Fire Horse Studio worked on a 100% CG 15 second TVC Film Construction's Director Matt Palmer and his Producer Susie Preswell were shooting and creating 2 live action TVC's posted at Frame Set and Match.

The Fire Horse Studio CG end tag would also become the end tag on the 2 live action TVC's.

Creating a convincing landscape is always going to be more challenging than any deep-space star background.

This realism was created with a combination of matte-painting, including a high resolution full-hemisphere sky plate, CGI hair for dynamic foreground grass, several particle systems generating everything from scrubby bushes on the terrain to dust clouds and exhaust plumes from the truck.

Ironically, the NSW outback was created by 2 animators born in the U.K.  Freelance 3D artist Nikki Bridgman joined the Fire Horse team for this project.

As well as rock formations, grass & trees, Nikki created a group of crows which flap away on approach of the truck.

Heading up the environment build was senior 3D artist, Nigel Haslam.

Considerable research and thought went into the exact topology, flora and fauna surrounding our stretch of road, to invoke a definite sense of location and reality.

Unlike our fictional landscape, however, the hero truck was modeled meticulously to match an existing truck which features in two live-action TVC's being produced simultaneously as part of the same campaign.

The highly detailed truck model weighed in at more 60,000 polygons and featured working steering, suspension systems and tipper tray.

Particle systems filled out the pile of cash in the back of the truck, consisting of about 10,000 particle notes, and around 200 hand placed "hero" notes.

Flexibility in the compositing stage is paramount to creating the polished look demanded of today's high end TVC's and catering for last minute change requests on behalf of a client.

At Fire Horse this is well implemented by a powerful render pass system which enabled the CGI to be rendered into 73 separate passes, all of which are fed into the Fire Horse pipeline.

Compositing was completed in-house by Scott Wilcox, in Fire Horse's new online suite. Multiple masters were required, for each of the ten different jackpot prize amounts, a task streamlined by the multi pass render system.

An email sent from EuroRSCG after the project was complete