Impossible Made Possible Ad

3D Street Painting in Honda Illusions

….and now the winner of the Cannes Gold Lion Award – Filmcraft : Best Art Direction / Production Design 

THIS IS JUST SOOOOOO COOL!!!!!!!!!! I am happy to announce that the new Honda CRV – An Impossible Made Possible CRV ‘Optical Illusion’ commercial has something really new to offer fans of 3D street painting – big art and big illusions, all the way around.

What’s really cool for me is that I got to play too! Director Chris Palmer invited me to the team to bounce his ground-breaking new vision off of in terms of how to make 3d illusions work. Some of these illusions were new to me, some not, so taking his lead, we had a blast playing with cameras, models, sketches, and all sorts of approaches as to how to make these images come to life. I’ve got to give it to Chris – he’s a mastermind when it came to not only working out the illusions but also how to ‘reveal’ the illusions, which was the best part of the project in my opinion.

One of the key components of the project was creating an Ames Room with a car – not an easy challenge but he certainly knew it could be done. We shot parking lots, cars at various angles, all sorts of layouts. With some back and forth, and many minds in the mix, his awesome team was able to find the perfect solution – half an Ames Room! Brilliant really.

My biggest contribution was the ‘False Floor’ illusion, or as my fans would call it, a ‘big 3d street painting’ showing a pit.

Everyone loved the location for the piece so I took that into consideration when designing the layout, and came up with a ‘pit of posts’ that echoed the local architecture and allowed for actors to move around the image with ease. Once on site in Zaragoza, Spain, I hit the ground with paint and rollers with a fantastic team of scenic artists from Barcelona, to create the large false floor image in the first segment of the advert. Chris and team loved the piece – so did the citizens of Zaragoza! Everyone was super excited to see a big 3d going down in their vicinity. The painting took 4 days to complete (a monumental task considering we had to tape everything off as we painted!) and was approximately 18m x 20m in size. Thanks to my fantastic team of painters for a tremendous job (particularly in working with my limited Spanish!): Maria, Sergio, Tony, Juan, Joaquin, Carmine & Mariajo – you guys are the best!!! Special thanks to project art director Jon for overall support.