Drivers Wanted! Noam Murro Directs Auto Vignettes For Team One Advertising.
By JEREMY LEHRER
The car, a compact seen from the side, seems to be driving itself. A pick-up truck passes as the car chugs along the highway. After a lengthy stretch, a dude with dreadlocks surfaces from the bowels of the car, holding a CD in one hand. Now that he’s found the CD, the gent sticks it into the car’s player. The fella bobs his head to the music. He then returns to his driving duties and finally pays attention to the road.
While this might seem like footage out of a reality program called America’s Most Dangerous Drivers, the scene is actually "CD," a :15 for LexusSafety. com, a Web site recently launched by the car manufacturer. The spot ends with the tag, "He drives the same roads you do," which segues to the site’s address, "LexusSafety.com." While the driver’s behavior is certainly dangerous, it has an exaggerated truth that makes the spot charming and amusing instead of frightening.
"CD" is part of a package of six :15s that just began running. The spots, via Team One Advertising, El Segundo, Calif., were directed by Noam Murro of Stiefel & Company, Santa Monica. Murro, who arrived at Stiefel & Company in September (SHOOT, 9/17/99, p. 1), directed the spots while he was still at bicoastal HKM Productions. Other spots in the campaign show the different ways in which drivers’ attention is diverted from the road: a man is seen changing his shirt ("Changing"); a woman putting drops in her eyes ("Eyedrop"); a businessman using his laptop computer and talking on his cell phone ("Multitasking"); an older woman kissing her dog ("Lapdog"); and a Gen-Xer driving a station wagon while eating a bowl of cereal ("Breakfast"). Some of the spots begin in a tight close-up only to later reveal that the protagonist is driving a car.
Tom Cordner, the co-chairman/creative director at Team One, said that the impetus for the spot campaign and the Web site was Lexus’s desire to enter a realm that other manufacturers had cornered. "[Lexus] builds great cars and they build great safe cars, but Volvo owns safety. And if Mercedes sneezes ‘safety,’ they own safety," he said. "Lexus is just as safe as any car on the road, but they don’t get credit for it. They came to us and said, ‘We want to find a way that we can get into consumers’ minds so that when they think of safety, they also think of Lexus."
To achieve that objective, Steve Levit, the creative director/art director for the spots at Team One, initially conceived the idea of developing a Web site that would demonstrate the different ways that Lexus addresses safety. While Team One’s interactive department developed the Web site, the creative department formulated the :15s to shepherd people to the site.
The agency settled on a humorous approach for the spots because the tone of Team One’s recent Lexus campaign—which includes "Late Again," "Self Image" and "Silent Treatment"—appeals to the funny bone. "If you look at the work we’re doing right now, it’s more of a lighthearted touch [in order to make] Lexus more approachable," said Cordner. "That’s where we’re going with all of our national and dealer advertising, for the most part."
The humorous tack also fit in with Lexus’ strategy in two ways: First of all, the approach enabled Team One and Lexus to avoid legal liability issues that crop up any time a car manufacturer wants to show how its automobiles perform in crash tests or in extreme driving conditions. And by showing the people in the spots driving cars other than Lexus, Team One remained true to the fruits of focus group research about Lexus drivers, who felt that they were safe drivers, though other drivers on the road often weren’t.
Cordner explained that the agency decided to include egregious driving behavior that people at the agency had witnessed. The creative team settled on nine scenarios, six of which are currently running. On broadcast television, two different spots will be running as bookends during commercial breaks. On cable television, two spots will be running back to back. Depending on the popularity of the initial six commercials, the agency may choose to keep the remaining three ads in reserve. Those spots show a woman flossing, a man reading a newspaper, and a couple kissing.
The LexusSafety.com site has a flash and a non-flash version. In "Avoidance" and "Protection," two sections of the site, users can peruse interactive demonstrations of Lexus’ safety features. In one of those demos, a braking game enables a user to explore the logistics and process of emergency braking. Another section of the site offers testimonials from drivers who survived accidents in Lexus cars. Other areas of the site provide links to other safety sites as well as Lexus’ main site.
Cordner said that the agency considered creating other interactive sections, but held back on implementing all of their ideas because of limited bandwidth. Team One will be gathering information about site visits, but that data was not yet available at press time.
When directing the spots, Murro said that he wanted to make sure that they were realistic enough so they looked like they might have been witnessed by a "voyeur" on the highway. "What we tried to do is keep [the scenes] a bit more natural and a bit more voyeuristic, like another driver would see it," explained Murro. "Not necessarily from the point of view of a cinematographer, but from the point of view of another driver. We tried to keep it as seemingly low-tech as possible and not go into the world where it becomes so contrived that you lose the believability of what’s happening."
While shooting the spots, Murro and his production team enlisted police assistance to intermittently block off a portion of a highway around Los Angeles. To maintain the "believability" that Murro wanted, the production team corralled a small caravan of cars that traveled up the blocked artery during each shot. The logistics of blocking off the highway and getting the group of cars together was an elaborate undertaking that gave Murro an inspired efficiency. "Part of the challenge was that you couldn’t do too many takes," noted Murro. "You’re driving down a highway, and getting back to step one was a nightmare."
Because of that, and because of the short length of the spots, Murro did extensive rehearsals with his actors to make sure they gave him the performance he wanted, given the constraints. "The challenge was to get performances that were convincing in a very short amount of time, but subtlety was also the key," Murro said. "The minute [the spot] becomes slapstick, it loses its humor and charm." Murro had to closely coordinate his direction with his cinematographer, since some of the spots begin with a tight shot that zooms out. In "Breakfast," for instance, a tight shot of the seemingly harmless cereal eater expands to reveal that the famished slacker is eating his cereal while driving down the highway.
Each of the drivers’ cars was connected to a rig, so somebody was driving the car even if the driver wasn’t. The rigs were built so that they wouldn’t be visible during the shoot, and Murro noted that nothing was removed from the shots in postproduction. The Inferno artist on the job created the titles used on the spots.
Murro noted that he enjoyed directing dot com spots and felt as though the genre had opened up new avenues in creativity and production. He is also directing a Super Bowl spot for hotjobs.com via McCann-Erickson Detroit, Troy, Mich., and has directed spots for snap.com via Saatchi & Saatchi, San Francisco.
"It’s certainly brought a lot of life into the business, which is great," he said. "It becomes a whole new world of advertising on one level … but it doesn’t really change that much. A good ad is a good ad, and that’s really the crux of it."
In addition to Cordner and Levit, personnel at Team One included John Figone, art director; Greg Collins, copywriter; and Beth Hagen, senior producer; Nikki Brancati, assistant producer. Assisting Murro at HKM were Shawn Lacy Tessaro, executive producer (who is also now at Stiefel & Company); Carr Donald, line producer; Larry Fong, DP; and John Reinhart, production designer. The spot was edited at Los Angeles-based Rock Paper Scissors, where the talent included Ben Longland, editor; Linda Carlson, executive producer; and David Sellars, producer. At The Digital Lab, Venice, Calif., Mike Cosola was colorist and Harris Bardfield was telecine assistant. For Sea Level, Venice, Calif., the team included Ben Gibbs, Inferno artist/online editor; Jeff Kim, Inferno assistant; and Erik Rogers, producer. For Santa Monica-based Eleven, Jeff Payne was mixer and Matt Downs was assistant mixer. The spot was shot on location in Los Angeles.
Tim Burton Discusses His Dread Of AI As An Exhibition of His Work Opens In London
The imagination of Tim Burton has produced ghosts and ghouls, Martians, monsters and misfits — all on display at an exhibition that is opening in London just in time for Halloween.
But you know what really scares him? Artificial intelligence.
Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that had used AI to blend his drawings with Disney characters "really disturbed me."
"It wasn't an intellectual thought — it was just an internal, visceral feeling," Burton told reporters during a preview of "The World of Tim Burton" exhibition at London's Design Museum. "I looked at those things and I thought, 'Some of these are pretty good.' … (But) it gave me a weird sort of scary feeling inside."
Burton said he thinks AI is unstoppable, because "once you can do it, people will do it." But he scoffed when asked if he'd use the technology in this work.
"To take over the world?" he laughed.
The exhibition reveals Burton to be an analogue artist, who started off as a child in the 1960s experimenting with paints and colored pencils in his suburban Californian home.
"I wasn't, early on, a very verbal person," Burton said. "Drawing was a way of expressing myself."
Decades later, after films including "Edward Scissorhands," "Batman," "The Nightmare Before Christmas" and "Beetlejuice," his ideas still begin with drawing. The exhibition includes 600 items from movie studio collections and Burton's personal archive, and traces those ideas as they advance from sketches through collaboration with set, production and costume designers on the way to the big screen.
London is the exhibition's final stop on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in... Read More