When Toyota was looking for a promotion for its new Scion line of cars, aimed squarely at what it terms Generation Y, it went straight to ATTIK, a global ad agency known for its non-traditional marketing initiatives for heavyweights such as Levis, Sony and Ford.

ATTIK came up with a concept it was sure would sell, a 60-second commercial dramatizing the evolution of Scion&singlequot;s first models, the Scion xA and xB, from their initial fictionalized robot form. Called “The Transformer,” the idea was to build the story to resemble a high-performance videogame, something the target audience would appreciate, and show it in cinemas across the country.

"In our research, we found automotive marketing to be largely devoid of brands trying to do something different," said ATTIK&singlequot;s group creative director Simon Needham, who is also creative director on the Scion account.  "By addressing lifestyle issues rather than focusing purely on the products, we feel our campaign&singlequot;s spots are unique enough to resonate with our audience.

The idea was one thing. Getting a rich, high-quality final product was another. Knowing the depths of graphical and animation wizardry required to bring the spots to life, ATTIK subcontracted out the animation portion to Sydney, Australia-based animation and effects company Ambience Entertainment.

Ambience&singlequot;s project director Rob Dupear said a key challenge in the project was being able “to package the action, speed, attitude and look of the gaming world, while also striving to avoid a 3D look,” he said. "I wanted a very raw, organic look, where randomness and unpredictability were key themes in the visual style.”

To that end, Dupear defined, designed and laid out every element of the robot in multiple views so that they could be accurately modeled by the Ambience 3D team, which used a Quantel gQ video design system, as well as a number of Maya and Digital Fusion workstations to build the creation.

Morten Rowley, Ambience&singlequot;s lead designer, said the team pushed for a smooth transformation from robot to Scion. "The shape of the robot&singlequot;s head matches the bonnet of the xA, the arms match the mud guards, and of course, the metallic colors and textures of the robot are taken straight from the cars themselves," he said.

In the spot, the robot escapes from a design lab and becomes the Scion. To get the look they wanted, the team used a painstaking design process to build the lab. "I had a very clear idea of the motion the explosion would take,” Rowley said. “So I created the lab as a rough in 3D and animated each shard just as it would be in the final scene."

After visualizing the robot and the virtual environments, the Ambience team shot live-action motion-control footage of the two Scion models on Super 35mm film. The film was then scanned and imported into the gQ as uncompressed 10-bit DPX files. Effects shots were loaded into gQ as uncompressed 2K files to allow for frame repositioning, Rowley said. The finished project was then recorded out to film.

The result? A spot that clearly resonates with the target audience. The ads are currently running in theaters throughout the Southwest.