Volvo Vision - EX90 - Framestore

I had the pleasure working with the Framestore Advertising team (from within the Framestore Art Department) to help create concepts for the Volvo EX90 commercial, and visualize the world of what we labelled as "Volvo Vision". I worked closely with Framestore creative director Kamen Markov and vfx supervisor William Laban to come up with a look to show how Volvo's lidar technology could look, but with soul and a bit of humanity.

I created close to a hundred concept images (and over 250 experimental render passes) to give myself a creative playground to explore this look. This started with heavy experimentation in Blender, playing with long exposure photography, particles, volumetric, plexus node setups, and more. I particularly enjoyed playing around with motion blur and extremely long shutter speeds to get effects that I used to do with old film cameras and long exposures. This was a hugely successful exercise in ideation and spitting out many many versions and ideas within a very short span of time. This is where the shader nodes came into its own by being able to branch off different looks and shaders, and combine them in super interesting ways, rendering out a version, and then doing it over and over again until I had a vast amount of render passes to then play with in photoshop. There was an equal amount of time compositing and painting all the versions in photoshop, with excessive use of layer comps to keep track of all the changes and versions. In the end, I was able to supply the vfx team with not only my concepts, but my 3d scene and render passes to show how I would end up with the final concept looks.

I've created a series gifs to cycle through the main versions we showed and discussed with creative Agency: Stendahls, and director Marcus Ibanez... this is followed by a huge image dump for anyone who'd like to see the nitty gritty full res images. The main idea behind the concepts became about softening lidar scanning with an artistic touch using volumetric and painterly treatments to give us something with more emotion. There's also a snazzy behind the scenes making of video from the Framestore advertising team for those who are interested! Enjoy!