Saatchi and Saatchi, the post-heavy director Laurent Bourdoiseau at Independent and the consistently clever CG and Flame artists at Glassworks bring us this 3D feast of a commercial for the world’s first performance hybrid sedan.

We open on a close up of what appear to be active cells running through a series of gradually branching out veins. The camera pulls back and reveals they are amassed inside a cell. The twig-like entities elongate and push through the cell’s membrane and into a neighbouring one, ‘breaking through’, as per the title of the piece. The two cells merge and morph into the Lexus GS450h. They represent the two engines of the car and are suggestive of the left and right sides of the brain, working together in perfect harmony.

The complexity of the job meant an initial month of research and development by Pete Reilly at Glassworks before embarking on anything else. Pete wrote a detailed scripted plan for the initial 3D sequence. The whole ad involved a total of eight weeks of 3D and Flame, completely constructing the first section and creating backgrounds for the car.