We’ve come to the point in video game development where, in many cases, the quality of animation is so high that to an untrained eye the graphics look real. This is particularly true of the motorsport genre where entire games are based on recreating cars and racing terrain to simulate the driving experience, and where there’s some freedom from the burden of creating life-like human characters. This is great news for gamers, but is a bit of a challenge for marketers of such games. People know these games look awesome so putting some footage in a spot just doesn’t pass muster like it used to.





So when it came time to promote Forza Motorsport 5, San Francisco-based agency twofifteenmccann decided to do something different. By combining high-tech gear with an old-school filmmaking style the agency turned a McLaren 12C supercar into the world’s fastest camera and a racetrack into living filmstrip. How? By mounting a Phantom Flex camera atop the car with a purpose-built rig, and enlisting pro driver Tanner Foust to race by 680 still frames output from the game at speeds topping 120 mph. The result is “Forza FilmSpeed”, a two-minute film that brings the game to life in the real world.

“The fidelity and realism of games has gotten to the point that it’s harder to get much more impressive and we were trying to find a way to bring the beauty, realism and excitement of this game to life in the real world,” says twofifteenmccann chief creative officer Scott Duchon. “So we started thinking, ‘Can we have a racecar with a camera mounted on it and, by the speed of the car, create the effect that the video game comes to life, kind of like a zoetrope? If you line up a bunch of stills from the game along the track, can we bring those two worlds together?”





With a great idea in hand, the real question became: was it possible? Looking for expertise, the agency turned to director Jeff Zwart. Known for his extensive experience shooting car commercials, Zwart is also an accomplished and active racecar driver and his intimate knowledge of the Barber Motorsports Park, where the commercial was to be shot, helped determine how to make the idea work.

Having recently raced that track, Zwart knew there were three straightaways and the top speed a driver could safely maintain on each stretch. “What we were being asked to do is turn a camera inside out. This was a case where the film was actually outside the camera, literally sitting next to the track. So it boiled down to math,” he says. “We needed to figure out how to take single images from the game footage and lay them out next to the track so that as you drove past them they would animate in to the game footage. It came down to three things that we had to consider: the size of the pictures we drove past, how fast the camera on the car was going to run per second, and what speed we needed to travel to capture all of this.”





His first test involved driving past test frames at 100 mph to determine how much distance was covered in one second. That information determined how big each frame needed to be. For instance, the max speeds on the three straightaways were 80, 100, and 120 mph. The fast the driving speed, the larger the printed frame needed to be. Says Zwart, “As long as we could drive past them at 30 of these frames in one second it would lock in and work.”

The game stills at trackside were output directly from Forza Motorsport 5, which, with its amazing fidelity, produced super-high resolution, art-like images (60 of those frames have been given to the top online Forza players around the world). To capture those images, Duchon says they went to developer Turn 10 Studios and played the game through hand-chosen sequences. The stills frames were then printed onto aluminum sheets, a process that Duchon says took over 30 days.