99% of the work I create nowadays is car commercials. Compared to anything and everything else you see on TV, they set the quality bar pretty low. You know exactly what I mean.

I’ve done hundreds of them. My work tends to look better than those extreme examples, but nonetheless, most car commercials are doomed before I even get to edit one thing.  I can only imagine that most people who see car commercials on TV either:

a. Tune it out completely, rendering the advertising message useless.

b. Change the channel.

c. Groan/roll eyes/ sigh/other symptom of aggravation.

d. Some combination of a, b, and c.

They are what they are: cheap and quick. I sometimes make 3 commercials in one day from start to finish. The deadlines are tough sometimes, as I work furiously to try and crank something out that is so subpar. Occasionally my attempts to add a bit of style to the car spot are vanquished. Plenty of times I’ve been told to change a commercial I worked on to severely downgrade its overall quality simply because the owner of John Smith Cars wants it that way. Nevermind that I am the artist, I just have to give the client what he wants. 

BUT! Occasionally I get to do something creative, something that can showcase more of my skills. This is part of a commercial I made that is a bit nicer than any of the harsh reality I spewed proceeding this clip.

Intentionally Annoying Car Commercial from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I actually had a lot of fun making that acid-trip-intense-fake-commercial. It’s mostly a combination of various After Effects expressions to make the objects wiggle, vibrate, and dance in the most obnoxious ways possible. It was a challenge to make a mockery of some of the annoying attention grabbing gimmicks I sometimes am asked to pull.

 

Here’s my take on car commercials:

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So here is a clip form a commercial I did that had to do with UCF Athletics. Instead of just using regular-old text, I constantly try to think of different methods to present title work. In this sports themed commercial I added the title work onto a material in Cinema 4D and created a waving pennant using the cloth tag.

I would recommend using the cloth tag to create any sort of waving flag like this rather than the wind deformer. The Cloth tag is very easy to set up and with some trial and error you can create a much more natural looking movement than with the simple wind deformer. Don’t forget to make it a child of a hyperNURBS object to make it even smoother.

There are several tutorials on this subject already out there, including this one.

I’d really like to get more in depth with the cloth tag to better understand how the settings can alter the movement and reaction of your object. I haven;t been able to find an in depth review of what certain things like flexion, global intersection analysis, global drag, etc. actually “do” when changed. If anyone has a breakdown of this to link to or would perhaps put it in writing please let me know.

So I had to come up with a design relatively quickly (That’s like 6 hours or so) that conveyed how owning a Ford vehicle already can save you a lot of money if you really want to buy a gas-guzzling F-150 that Ford is practically giving away.

Money Mailbox from Michael Szabo on Vimeo.

I modeled the mailbox in Cinema 4D and made it fully functional with a door and a flag. The money particle was easy to make, with a wind deformer modifying a plane object with both sides of a $100 bill as the materials. The emitter works well, but it lacks collision detection so the particles tend to intersect and overlap in ways a giant stream of money flying out of a mailbox wouldn’t here in the real world. Without using Xpresso and Thinking Particles I couldn’t get it to react properly, but the bills are moving fast with a motion blur and rotating so you really can’t tell. And thats what it’s all about, getting it done ASAP by finding corners to cut.

Thinking Particles is something I want to get good at, but there are no great books or resources I have been able to find to teach me. 

Here’s a spot I did that shows off the toughness of the Toyota Tundra. It came out pretty cool, but unfortunately the compression knocks the visual quality down a notch. I used Apple Motion, After Effects and some Photoshop. The last 5 seconds are where you insert a dealer’s logo and location information.

***Safari 3 is having problems playing these embedded videos, but they work fine in Firefox. You can try that browser or click here to use a different page to view them.***

 
 

Toyota Tundra Rough Cut from Michael Szabo and Vimeo.