INK: Electro Seoul
INK’S David Macey finds the inner beauty of Polestar’s latest EV in these stunning images
Creative studio INK showcases amazing vehicle visualisations
INK knows cars. The London-based CGI creative studio has produced pristine campaigns for everyone from Land Rover to Mclaren, while creating abstract four-wheel imagery with passion projects that strip classic cars back to the bare bones or inflate them like balloons. And when it’s not visualising vehicles, the company specialises in the technologies of tomorrow, from robotics to smartwatches.
“We started out doing visualisation,” explains David Macey, INK’S co-founder and executive creative director. “But as the company grew, our passion took us into the areas we love, such as technology and automobiles. We believe in the technical and the beautiful, which means that no matter how dry something might be, we always try to find that inner beauty, something that hasn’t been seen before.”
The studio’s unique understanding of technology attracted the attention of Polestar, the forward-thinking electric vehicle brand. With the company about to launch its Teslachallenging Polestar 2 EV, INK was invited to create a series of images that posit the vehicle’s clean white lines against a futuristic backdrop. Polestar had already found the perfect location: the Zaha Hadiddesigned Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul, South Korea.
“The whole idea was to make something that was otherworldly, something that had an air of mystery – but it couldn’t feel dystopian,” says Macey. “It had to be like, ‘This is the clean world of tomorrow.’ They felt that this architecture encapsulated their beliefs; it’s a little bit alien, but it feels human as well. It’s got that perfect balance.”
SEEING REDGROVE
Renowned photographer Benedict Redgrove was commissioned to shoot the architectural environment, having formed a harmonious relationship with the studio through years of collaboration on projects for clients including WIRED, NASA and Salaff Supercars. Drawing on his formal training as a designer,
Redgrove drove the language of the imagery with his trademark clean and minimal style.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned through working with Benedict is that he always sees a project differently to anyone else and that makes it really special,” enthuses Macey. “So all those typical angles you find on a car, he’ll have it in his head and it’ll be completely different from what everyone else is thinking, but it will look really cool at the same time.”
Polestar too played a major role in the imagery – something you’d expect from a firm that features a former car designer as its CEO. The Polestar 2’s senior design team, who saw the vehicle through from initial sketch to production, was on hand throughout the INK shoot to advise about specific design features and last-minute changes to the final model.
KOREA MOVES
Location work on the project began in January 2019, with Polestar sending a scout to South Korea to scope out the DDP, secure permits and create an in-depth survey of the site. Macey, Redgrove and his assistant followed in February with the Polestar design team in tow, to join a local crew on the ground.
The crew made use of an impressive array of tech to capture the setting. The stills were taken with a Phase One XF camera, capable of generating shots in excess of 100MP, allowing for versatile crops with no loss of quality. Macey also deployed a Lizardq robotic camera mount to quickly capture HDR images, a reference cube for scale and perspective, and a chrome sphere to accurately indicate where the combination of HDR and geometry should be placed.
Back at the hotel, they would use a real-time digital replica of the Polestar to plan shots. “We had a computer set up and myself, Benedict and the client team would do layouts for the shots we’d taken that day,” recalls Macey. “We did two days recceing where we shot a load of positions, and then used the digicar so we could quickly test layouts. It was quite a gruelling process but the whole team on the project made it such good fun.”
Macey and the team also sent dailies back to the studio in London. Here, the team could take advantage of desktop computing power and a render farm to generate high-quality imagery, which could then be sent back to Seoul for further feedback.
TELLING STORIES
Back in London, the process of making the images began.
Injecting a subtle human touch into the DDP environment would be key to selling the campaign, so the creative team thought long and hard about the stories they wanted to tell. Would the car have just picked up passengers from the airport? Or had it just been released from storage? They even went as far as to consider the noise it would make as it rolled over the concrete.
On similar projects, INK has used a stand-in car to achieve a sense of scale and perspective, but because of the DDP’S pedestrianised nature, this would have been slow and cumbersome. Macey believes the invisible car approach changed the outcome of the project for the better.
“A stand-in car gives you the literal reference,” he says. “And having a literal reference just means that’s what the car looks like. But it slows up the shoot and cuts down the number of shots you’re going to get in a day, or in that moment of light. Instead, we’re making an image from these components and there has to be a certain amount of artistic licence. It forced us to think harder about the images and use our imagination.”
As well as creating a photorealistic digital car from CAD data supplied by Polestar, INK also had to augment the setting. The DDP walkways are also dotted with street furniture and shrubbery, which make it a great place for a stroll but somewhat less believable as somewhere you’d drive.
“We wanted to be respectful to the architecture, but we had to change some elements to get it where we wanted it to be,” says Macey. “From the outset, we knew we’d have to change the floor in all the shots because it’s broken up with planters and trees and it just
doesn’t look like a place a car would travel in. Also, it dictates scale, and that even comes down to the grain of the concrete.”
A SENSE OF SCALE
INK worked with Redgrove in postproduction to envisage his vision for the project. Some elements were recreated in CGI or digitally retouched to achieve Redgrove’s distinctive crisp, clean aesthetic, and perspectives and scales were altered to give the shots an ever-so-slightly otherworldly feel.
“It was quite tough finding the balance between cheating perspective and still making it look believable,” says Macey. “That’s a really subjective thing and we had a lot of conversations back and forth with Benedict and the client about, ‘Do we believe it, is it real?’ The biggest challenge on the product was making these angles where you cheat the perspective, you cheat the scale – but you still believe it.”
To achieve the desired ethereal lighting effects, the INK team made use of HDRS in V-ray – a fast and efficient workflow that has proven successful in their previous projects. INK even discovered useful shortcuts for creating realistic renders.
“We render out separate passes where we cheat the HDR by rotating it,” explains Macey. “If you were to go in and align the HDR accurately, the car might look real – but it may not look good. We rotate the HDR to generate different types of reflections, so we do the benchmarking, we technically put it in. And then we run a lot of rotations to get different reflections that are blended together to get the look we want.”
The final images combine INK’S love of the technical and the beautiful in a way that subtly attracts attention, using the curves of Zaha Hadid’s architecture to draw the eye to the form of the car.
“We’re calling it a project where art meets advertising, as such, that junction of those two components,” Macey explains. “And it sounds really high brow, but I feel like a few of our projects have fallen into that category, and this is one of them. This isn’t just car advertising. We’re trying to create something that hasn’t been seen before.”
“WE TRY TO FIND THAT INNER BEAUTY, SOMETHING THAT HASN’T BEEN SEEN BEFORE” David Macey, co-founder, INK