Mercedes Vision Van. The future.
“This film was part of an interactive launch for the Mercedes Vision Van to be shown at trade fairs and shows, so there were many formats we had to shoot for. The idea was to show how the Vision Van concept will change the future of package deliveries.”
“Mercedes really wanted something they could play on a 40m wide screen to hundreds of people in the audience. The film was designed to interact and blend seamlessly with the show, the actual concept van and drones as they came on stage.”
“Prelaunch concept car films, like this one, are always very secretive. We had to find a location where everyone in the village would sign an NDA saying they would keep the project a secret. In the end, we found a village outside of Munich that had this beautiful architect designed modernist house.”
“You could say it was like a Taj Mahal in the middle of a very average German village. The other reason we chose to shoot in a village is that drones can only fly in the countryside of Germany and not in the cities!”
“We managed to convince everyone in the village to sign the NDA, except for the family that lived next to the modernist house! Because they weren’t under NDA, we had to build black privacy screens around everything we were doing, that all had to be removed later in post.”
“And so we had mountains of black screens everywhere that the neighbour was always trying to take a sneak peek around. So there was plenty of complications with this project.”
“Even the aerials above the house’s garage shows another of Mercedes top secret electric cars, so it wasn’t just the Vision Van we had to keep private from the neighbours. These were very futuristic sci-fi type of vehicles so the security around them was totally insane.”
“The other complicated part to this shoot was all of the drone ‘shooting drone’ scenes. Mercedes sent about a dozen technicians to manage the van and the two drones and we had two of these guys constantly updating the flight programs that controlled the drones.”
“Shooting drones from another drone is really quite difficult. They can’t fly too close to each other because of the down wash from their rotors, especially when you are flying over houses! Although, we weren’t shooting from something with a heavy down wash like a helicopter, these big drones can still be pretty tricky with their down wash.”
“The Mercedes technicians were able to reprogram their drones so that we could get some really amazing shots. However, these are the sorts of scenes you want to shoot when the rest of the crew are having lunch. We had to squeeze all of these complicated shots in while the set was quiet, without all the actors and gaffers being around!”
“During our production meetings we got to meet all of the technicians behind the different deployment systems created by Mercedes. We worked with all of the teams who developed the automated packaging systems, the drones, the EV team and the watch control team. They were developing an entire ecosystem for something nobody had ever thought of before or even requested. All of this was just being done to show the logistics markets what they are capable of. So it was an incredibly ambitious project that we both really admired Mercedes for doing.”
”These were real working systems, so Mercedes didn’t want to fake anything in their films. It was all so well crafted that it was super important that we showed how elegant and beautiful this system really is. The whole ecosystem had to be real.”
“But there were still some things we needed to do in VFX, such as the futuristic control room. We did a lot of preparation with this location. For example, the upper section of the room, where the lights come out, well, they’re actually the air conditioning slots”
“We had the gaffers put lights in to each vent which we then diffused to give it that futuristic look. We modelled the whole room in 3D with rounded windows during preproduction, whereas the real location actually had rectangular windows. So we had to glue rounded cut outs to each window, just to make them look more futurist.”
“The perspective we had to shoot from was very client specific. You can see there were trees in the background of the windows that the client really wanted to keep. We are finding more of our clients are showing ecosystems in their films these days, so this scene was a lot about the windows!”
“Although the van’s packaging ecosystem was fully functional for the shoot, we still had to create a lot of the boxes and packaging in CGI. You can imagine all of the perspective shifts involved in this scene. We could easily have needed 6-7 plates from a dedicated second unit, but we didn’t have a second crew or camera. In the end, all we had time to shoot was 3 plates off the main camera.”
“We used two companies to get all of the VFX done. We split the motion graphics with one group and the car shots were split with another company. The car shots were done by Trickster, who we had worked with on a movie for Marvel. The other stuff we gave to a small creative collective who were working out of Northern Germany. So our VFX supervisor had to track both of these different teams to get everything done in time.”
“Mercedes originally wanted this shot 16:9 50fps, because of the projectors they were using at the trade fairs. But as cinematic filmmakers, we are always fighting against these things. And so we had a long discussion with the client where we decided to shoot anamorphic on an Alexa 4.3 at 2.8K and then reframe for all of the different formats. We had a special custom rig where the grips and checkers could make sure we were correctly framed for all of theses differ”
