2018 Kia Stinger | Steven Tyler Big Game Ad – Feel something again

Kia’s 2018 Super Bowl spot “Feel Something Again” stars rock legend Steven Tyler, who drives the Kia Stinger in reverse — straight back to his 1970s prime. Created by agency David&Goliath, the :60 ad opens at an old abandoned racetrack with “Dream On” playing backwards as Tyler squares off against two-time Formula One and Indianapolis 500 champion Emerson Fittipaldi. Rather than racing forward, Tyler takes the Stinger backwards around the track and steps out as a young rock star at the moment he felt most alive, before the on-screen text delivers the message: “Feel Something Again.”

One of the biggest challenges was authentically re-creating the 25-year-old version of Steven. SCANable’s 3D scanning gave The Mill the measured data needed to get it absolutely right, earning the glowing approval of Steven, his daughter, friends and a handful of rockers who know him best.

De-aging is a likeness problem before it is a rendering problem

Making a recognisable person look forty years younger is not a filter. It is a modelled face that has to be someone specific, in motion, in close-up, in front of an audience that knows exactly what that person looks like.

Face replacement is the highest bar a scan gets held to. A body double can be softened by wardrobe, distance, or motion blur. A face is centred, lit, and held.

What the scan contributes is ground truth: measured facial geometry of the actual person at the actual proportions, so everything the artists do afterwards is a deliberate departure from a known starting point rather than an accumulation of guesses. That is the foundation digital doubles are built on.

The product is a subject too

Advertising work usually centres on a single object, photographed better than anything is photographed in a feature, and frequently duplicated or replaced digitally.

Hero objects are also among the least cooperative things to scan. Gloss paint, chrome, and glass all break the assumption photogrammetry relies on — that a surface looks the same from every angle. They are handled with polarisation, controlled lighting, and capture strategies chosen for the material rather than applied by default.

The output is the same in the end: clean topology and render-ready geometry that matches the physical article.

Sixty seconds gets feature-level scrutiny

A national broadcast spot is watched more attentively than most film sequences, by an audience actively looking for the trick, often more than once.

There is no forgiving cutaway and no long build of goodwill. Every frame is judged. So advertising is captured to the same standard as feature work, on a schedule that is usually far shorter.

Commercial capture windows are measured in hours, not days. Our Mobile CyberSCAN™ Studios travel to the shoot for that reason — scanning fits inside a talent’s availability instead of consuming it.

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