All Singin’ VW

By Matthew Bath and Ed Ewing | on March 30, 2005

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Recreating the famous Singin’ in the Rain sequence to advertise the VW Golf GTI was the challenge for Stink. It came up smelling of roses.

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You’ve probably seen it on TV by now. The camera opens on an atmospherically lit Gene Kelly, swinging on a lampost, singing the merry tune that we all know and love from 1952’s Hollywood hit smash Singin’ in the Rain.
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Then, a hip-hop beat drops and Kelly is flick-flacking through the puddles, breakdancing across the cobbles and getting jiggy with a shiny new Volkswagen Golf Gti.
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Left aghast at the digital wizardry employed by those clever technicians at production company Stink we rushed to find out how they’d done it. I mean, Kelly’s not still alive is he?
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“A copy of the set used in the classic movie was built at Shepperton Studios, using rain machines. A camera mounted on a crane was used for the majority of the shots to match the feel of the original film.” As well as the set, directing duo NE-O cut a rough animatic from the film that was used as a guide throughout production.

Digital head

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Sophie is keen to point out that no digital actors were harmed in the making of this spot. “Every shot uses Gene’s head from the original movie. First, we needed to remove the dancer’s head - this was accomplished by repeating a similar camera move for a clean background pass on set. In Inferno, the clean pass was stabilized, tracked and mapped onto the dancer’s head.
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“We sourced a high-definition master of the original sequence, then edited the shots of Gene – a particularly complicated process as some shots are 15 seconds long – and in certain cases Gene’s head had to be reversed, frame-cut and morphed together to match the dancer’s moves.
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“This was then cut out and stabilized from the film before being tracked back onto the dancer’s body.
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