Bill Bennett, ASC was the cinematographer for this Lincoln MKZ commercial directed by Andrew Sinagra at Ntropic. Andrew was also the Visual Effects Supervisor on the project. The car was so new, it was not available at the time of shooting, so a BMW 6-series was used as the stand-in car on location.

 

The location is the huge Museum of Arts and Science in Valencia, Spain. The camera used was the ARRI Alexa Plus, recording the camera pitch & roll, lens focus distance, lens focal length, and lens aperture to the imbedded Alexa shot metadata. Andrew Sinagra, along with Nate Robinson and his crew at Ntropic placed a CGI version of the new car into the various shots. They utilized this metadata in post to help fit the CGI components into the shots. Bill used various techniques including constantly zooming during the shots, as something without this frame-by-frame metadata, would have made the post CGI components very difficult to achieve.

 

The team also recorded the light in the environment with a 4mm fisheye on a Red Epic, shooting straight up, mounted on top of another vehicle. After we did each shot with the stand-in car and the Alexa, another crew would drive the Epic camera through the shot to record the reflections that were later mapped back into the CG car surfaces. You will notice that the lens flares that we shot with the Alexa and Epic on location are blended perfectly with the CG car.