Infiniti commercial (plus singing rodents)

Cafe Society
#1

In the new commercials for the Infiniti automobile, they show a car driving around the streets of what appears to be Manhattan. The streets are completely empty of other vehicles.

How did they do this? Even if it wasn’t NYC, I assume any major city would have 24-7 traffic. Would a city government agree to shut down several blocks of major streets to accomodate an ad agency? How much would you have to pay for something like that? Or am I just underestimating the current state of the art in CGI and the whole thing was faked?

Also, what the heck are those things in the Quizno’s ads? They appear to be cut-out animations of rats. Did anyone consider that rodents might not be the ideal mascot for a fast food chain?

#2

They’re The Spongmonkeys. They’ve been floating around on Rathergood.com for some time now. Personally, I’m waiting for a major national company to pick up Jay Stile as a spokesman :eek:.

#3

As to your first question, I don’t know how they actually did it. But it could very easily have been computer generated. At the current state of the art, they can make animals look perfectly realistic, and they’re making big progress on humans (actually probably better than animals, but we’re better at recognizing humans, so the bar is higher). By comparison, inanimate objects are very easy, and we’ve been able to do those well for a few years now.