Do you believe every car ad you see is real? Do you think the supermodel on the screen hasn’t been airbrushed? Are you aware there is such a thing as imagination and creativity using more than just CGI? Of course you do and product advertising companies use your eyes to try and deceive you most of the time. While the products they show you are typically real enough in concept, they usually aren’t the complete real deal that you’ll see on the shelf when you go to the store to pick up the item.

Just like the sandwich that a fast food chain shows you on the menu doesn’t look anything like what you actually get when you order; most items have been improved to create a sales pitch. If you were shown what you’re really going to get you would be severely disappointed in the results. With the benefit of creativity and camera angles you can enjoy the ads you see on TV and know at least some of what you see, even in car commercials, has been embellished. Yes, you aren’t even being shown the actual car in some cases, but you are being shown what the advertisers feel will make you want the car.

Such is the case when photographer Felix Hernandez was hired by Audi to create their new Audi R8 commercials. Hernandez does use real items and puts them in situations that work well, but the scale of this reality is what is amazing. Did Audi need to give Hernandez one of their $160,000 supercars to work with for his project? Nope, as you can see in this video, all he needed was a $40 detailed model off the internet, some flour and his imagination. The commercial he was able to create for Audi showed the car coming out of a snowstorm and driving along the coast of a beach area to make it look like the car was in Cancun or in the Yukon Territory.

In reality the car was in the studio at Hernandez’s home where he shoots most of his projects. He has become a master at not only using smaller scale items to create larger than life images, but he’s become the master of scale. He’s mastered the craft of making small items come to life, a process that was used for many films in the early time of filmmaking and was certainly present when the original Star Wars was being shot.

Now that we have CGI and the ability to create so much with computers, why would Hernandez continue to work the way he does? He is able to create snow or dust with flour, rain drops with corn syrup and use smoke to create mystery. Because of this ability he is an artist that does things with real items and bring the scale up to make it look larger than it is. Hernandez is truly an artist and a talent that has become endangered as we’ve grown to rely on computers for more of the work we do, but as you can see from his Audi R8 commercial, he’s a master at what he does.