Telling the story of Hyundai’s technological journey from the internal combustion engine to the all-electric IONOQ 5 presented Fin’s VFX crew with a unique set of challenges.

Continuing a very fruitful journey of collaboration, the team worked under the always-on-point creative guidance of director Michael Spiccia.

The film sees the familiar shape of a Hyundai Excel slowly peel away, like a snake shedding its skin, to reveal the futuristic form of the new IONOQ 5.

Achieving this required many layers of complex CG simulations, executed in Houdini, to represent the various different materials of the old car giving way to reveal the new one.
Paint flakes are shed into the breeze, sheet metal crinkles and peels like aluminium foil, seats are seen to unstitch themselves thread by thread and the dashboard vinyl shrivels away to nothing.
Each element required multiple iterations of look development to find the right visual signature for its motion.

Overarching all of the shots was the fundamental issue that the IONIC 5 is physically larger than the Excel from which it emerges.

Much attention was paid to evolving the flow and the pacing of the visual effect beats to make this visual paradox a non-issue in the final film.

Although the film was shot in spectacular fashion amongst the iconic Flinders Ranges, the dirt road along which the car is travelling often required extensive digital alterations to the landscape to maintain a consistent appearance across the shots – sometimes requiring 3d vegetation to cover up swathes of barren roadside dirt.
A large cloud of CG dust behind the car was added to lend an epic feel to the hero car’s progress through the outback scenery.

With almost no two shots containing the same visual effects recipe, it’s true to say that this beautiful spot stretched Fin’s VFX artistic repertoire like few others in recent memory.