Video: Despite being four years old, this 60-second spot for a brand of kitchen countertops is still some of the best, most realistic 3D I’ve ever seen. It’s not only the perfect produce falling in slow motion — it’s everything. The ink drops, the bits of quartz, the stones, the gas, the vitroceramic. Everything.
According to the creator of the spot — Alex Roman — they didn’t have the budget to film this in real life, even while it is actually possible to do most of it with real objects and film. That option would have been too expensive to produce with this level of perfection:
Realism was my main goal here. I firstly thought of shooting some live-action but after studying carefully the budget and deadline I realised that CGI was the only way I could do it. The most important part for me was to deliver a beautiful and very visual commercial and keep the viewer focused on the commercial itself, not the fact that it was a CG piece: the photorealism was the only option I had to achieve this.
And he succeeded. Check it out.