Prague studio created the villa in Škoda Peaq launch photos

When Škoda Auto unveiled its new flagship electric car, the Peaq, this summer, striking official photos circled the globe — a seven-seat SUV priced from 1.15 million crowns standing on the terrace of a luxury poolside villa against a sunset. The picture looks like it's straight out of a glossy real-estate catalogue, but in reality no such villa exists — it was all created at the Prague studio Punctum Images.

Behind this striking visual are two Czech entrepreneurs, Jakub Vlček and Tomáš Nadr, who founded the studio ten years ago. Their team created not just the car but the entire setting, lighting and final composition that Škoda used to launch the new model in markets around the world. The studio recently did similar work for the launch of the new Toyota Highlander in the American market, building the digital environment, photos and videos.

Punctum Images is based in the DOX+ building in Prague's Holešovice district, owned by the contemporary art centre of the same name. Vlček and Nadr first met around 2000 through Freeride.cz, an online magazine about cycling and snowboarding that they founded together with Martin Večerka. Later their paths diverged: Nadr went into marketing and worked at the agencies Ogilvy and Havas, while Vlček moved into photography and post-production, gaining experience at German studios specialising in automotive visual work. In 2016 the two partners teamed up again and founded Punctum Images.

They started out in photo post-production, polishing finished campaigns for brands such as Pilsner Urquell, Česká spořitelna and Benzina. But over a few years the advertising content industry changed, and the studio shifted toward computer graphics and the automotive sector, which Vlček knew well from his time in Germany. Neither founder, however, is a dedicated car enthusiast — “we see cars more as beautiful, fairly complex objects that are genuinely tricky to render visually,” Vlček explains.

For carmakers, the studio builds virtual sets as an alternative to traditional location shoots. Instead of an expensive and risky shoot in some exotic location, Punctum designs the scenes on a computer, with full control over light and weather. Often the cars themselves aren't even photographed at all — the studio receives 3D models from manufacturers and then refines them visually, down to paintwork, materials and interior. The result is a digital twin of the car that can be worked with almost like a real vehicle in front of a camera.

Still, Punctum doesn't position itself merely as a technical CGI contractor — the company bets on its own creativity, developing concepts, settings, lighting, composition and camerawork. “We don't want to be a studio that gets a brief and just churns out an image — we're more interested in working with the client from the very start to figure out what the whole project should look like and what it should convey to the viewer,” says Vlček. The studio combines CGI with classic photography, filming and artificial intelligence, and when human expression and natural movement matter, actors are filmed live, with the digital world built around them using AI.