After checking out the lines of the sporty-looking truck, she opens the passenger door where the vehicle's driver is revealed. It's fellow mud flap resident Yosemite Sam behind the wheel.
"It's a simple idea and Andy's vision was to bring it to life, not complicate it," says RPA's senior producer Julie Dolson. "Andy and everyone over at A52 delivered in a ridiculously compressed timeframe without sacrificing quality."
Hall shot the Ridgeline at South Bay Studios in Long Beach, with Eric Schmidt serving as his director of photography. For some of the scenes, a woman in a black leotard was shot moving around the truck. The live-action footage was then used as the basis for the movement of the animated girl.
A52 Inferno artist Pat Murphy worked closely with Hall to design the spot's opening scene, showing a girl-adorned mud flap on a moving truck. A52's CG team of Dan Gutierrez and
Max Ulichney created the girl, the photoreal mudflap, and a rubberized, textured version of the Honda logo in Autodesk Maya.
Murphy's 2D team, including Alicia Aguilera, composited all the CG elements in Inferno together with the moving road, and applied various effects to heighten the realism of the opening and closing scenes.
A52's team also touched-up Yosemite Sam to put him behind the wheel of the Ridgeline, sans his famous six-shooters.
Company 3's Mike Pethel served as the colorist for the spot, which was edited by Rock Paper Scissors' Brad Waskewich and features music by Nick Armstrong and the Thieves, and sound design by the team at Hum in Santa Monica. The spot's final mix was engineered by Jimmy Hite of Margarita Mix de Santa Monica.