Wow, a real life Transformer? Has a chassis that can adapt to match the exact length and width of nearly every car. Is electric powered! Can be tuned to simulate the characteristics of almost any car (ride height, rigidity, damping, gear shifts, acceleration, etc). Basically The Mill’s BLACKBIRD is a blank car you can swap in for any car of your dreams.

Has 4x RED cameras mounted to film its surroundings, also a laser scanner to recreate the environment for accurate compositing (such as reflections) and for VR (you can see the HTC Vive used in the video).

Then a CG car body gets dropped over on top of it in post. Clients can even use the Blackbird Augment Reality app to see a live CG rendering of the vehicle on location.

This can be useful to car manufacturers for a number of reasons, such as if availability of the car is difficult due to production scheduling vs shoot dates, or if the car needs to be kept tightly under wraps from the motoring paparazzi. Or if numerous variants of the car advert are needed (due to changes from one year’s model to the next, or due to different versions of the car for different regions of the world).

Fantastic use of merging Virtual Reality techniques with conventional filming.

Watch the whole video here:

First time I remember coming across a tutorial of the uses of CGI cars being composited into a real life scene was years ago when I saw this HitFilm tutorial, is worth a watch if you’re curious about understanding the basics of how this works: