Leave No Trace
Toyota bZ4X

Every effects-heavy set has one: a person in a green suit who pushes the climber up the rock, holds the stunt in place and disappears from the final frame. Conill's idea for Toyota was to make him the hero. Like the all-electric bZ4X, he does the work without being noticed, and he leaves no trace. For a post house, it was a familiar job description.

In one scene, a queen gently strokes the head of a dragon, and the script had the camera pull back to reveal a monitor. We changed the shot and used a wipe instead, from the dragon straight to the reality of the set: the Green Man, resting his head in her lap. In a short spot, it reads faster. We built the dragon in 3D, and in the spot it replaces his head.

Not Normal, the production company that made the piece possible, invited us to be part of it. We supervised VFX on set, then took the spot through post.

The spot was shot on a virtual set: an LED stage powered by Unreal Engine, with live actors in front of it and CGI added later. We had one day on that stage. Before the shoot, we used previs to find the best moves and camera positions, and to define how big the dragon would be.

To keep working inside the stage, the production team built a mobile rock that could be moved in and out quickly and still look real. The actors had to look at, and touch, things that were not there.

When Ari Evasio, the director, presented the canyon shot, he felt it was missing one last detail. We sat down to see how to tie the rock into the canyon and make the moment more dramatic. In the close-up, we added CGI so the rock seems to be splitting, with particles falling. In the medium shot, besides the atmosphere, we added particles caught in the turbulence of a wind that did not exist.

The smallest details make a scene like this feel real. At one point we realized the dragon would pass between the key light and her. We ran a test, and it worked. On the bridge, the cinematography helped: the key light came from where she would watch the dragon go by, and the shadow that crossed her tied the two together, first in the edit and then in the timing we gave the dragon as it glides near her.

When she touches the dragon, we had to do the same thing the other way around. We projected her shadow onto the dragon in post, using a digital character that copied her movements.

The rest was 3D modeling, the dragon's expressions, atmosphere and the final color. We struggled with the design of the dragon, and for a while we could not decide which one was right for the story. The tools were Unreal Engine, Blender, Adobe Suite (After Effects and Photoshop) and DaVinci Resolve.

Some fixes were small. At the last minute, we went back to the start of the astronaut shot and mapped the reflection of a starry sky onto the helmet.

Then there was the product. At the end of the spot, the bZ4X drives through the city at dusk and then parks to charge, and that is where the Green Man appears. But the location had no electric chargers and no parking lines. This is why we like working hand in hand with the director and production: we all knew what that light at dusk was worth, and nobody wanted to lose the magic hour. We added the chargers and plants in CG, from 3D stock models. We fixed it in post.

Post ran long, and the agency was in Los Angeles while we were in Miami. For the remote sessions, especially color, we used the first version of Colorfront Streamer. It let us work in real time, in good quality and over a secure connection, as if we were in the same room.

Leave No Trace won Gold at El Ojo de Iberoamérica 2025 in the El Ojo Film category, and Silver at FIAP 2025.

The Green Man wasn’t alone. The full list of people who made this is below.