Nissan #withdad Super Bowl XLIX (2015)

‘#withdad’ is Nissan’s Super Bowl XLIX commercial, which aired during the second quarter of the 2015 broadcast. Directed by Lance Acord for Park Pictures with visual effects by a52, the spot follows the struggles of a hardworking, close-knit family striving for togetherness across the years. As part of the #withdad campaign, Nissan pledged donations of up to $1,000,000 to two organizations that help people build better lives for themselves and their families: Habitat for Humanity and Wounded Warrior Project.

The SCANable team performed 3D laser scanning of the Circuit of the Americas race track in Austin, Texas — well known as host of the Formula One United States Grand Prix and many other racing championships — and scanned numerous race cars for the visual effects work, supporting computer-generated crowd population, precise camera tracking, and other complex VFX elements.

A venue measured in miles

Room-scale scanning and site-scale scanning use some of the same instruments and are otherwise different jobs.

A purpose-built circuit is kilometres of track, grandstands, pit structures and terrain, much of it without convenient registration targets and with long sight-lines where small angular errors become large positional ones. Coverage has to be planned as a survey, with a control strategy that holds the whole site in one coordinate frame, rather than as a walk-around with a tripod.

Terrestrial LiDAR does the close work well. Where line of sight runs out — roof planes, terrain, anything a tripod cannot see — aerial photogrammetry is the usual complement, and the two register into a single model. The underlying discipline is enterprise survey, not set dressing.

A fleet, not a hero car

Scanning one car is a hero-asset problem. Scanning several is a consistency problem.

Every vehicle has to be captured to the same standard, at the same scale, with matching conventions, because they will share frames. Any variation between them reads to an audience as a difference in quality rather than a difference in car.

Liveries, numbers and sponsor decals also mean the texture work carries as much identifying information as the geometry does. A shape that is correct with a decal in the wrong place is still the wrong car, and motorsport audiences notice immediately.

Super Bowl schedules run backwards from air date

A broadcast slot bought months in advance does not move. Everything upstream of it compresses to fit.

That reverses the usual planning. Capture is not scheduled when it is convenient; it is scheduled at the last moment that still leaves post enough runway, which in practice means a single window, often at a venue with its own booking calendar.

Under that pressure the value of scanning is less about fidelity than about certainty. Measured geometry removes an entire class of late question — what size, what distance, what angle — at exactly the point in the schedule when there is no time left to answer it any other way.

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