If you work in an office, chances are you’ve found yourself plotting your escape. Three guys not only plot but execute a rather great escape in a new :60 spot for the Hummer H3 titled (what else?) “Escape.”
Created by Modernista!, Boston, and directed by Fredrik Bond of bicoastal/international MJZ, the engaging spot opens in a typical office. “I’ll be back at two,” the big boss announces as he heads out.
With that, three office workers spring into action and clearly they’ve been planning this. While dummies assume their tedious work tasks (one is stationed at the copier), the men punch out a ceiling panel from which a ladder falls. They scramble up the ladder and, following a map, make their way through a maze of ductwork, ultimately dropping into an office with windows that looks out onto the parking lot below. As one of the guys furiously attempts to destroy the map to the ductwork in a shredder, the other two open a window and feed through the cables that they will use to slide down to the ground.
But before they can escape, executives approach, and the shredder guy realizes that he isn’t going to be able to shred the map in time. “Save yourselves,” he tells the other two as he shoves what’s left of the map into his mouth.
Landing on the ground, the other two men dash across the grass toward the parking lot, disguising themselves as bushes.
At the edge of the lot, they drop their disguises and make a break for it, sprinting for dear life to the Hummer H3 that awaits them.
Suddenly, the third man emerges from behind a grassy knoll. He escaped the office, after all, donning a cleaning woman get-up complete with a plunger.
Diving into the vehicle, the three men speed out of the parking lot and whip past a manned security checkpoint.
The spot concludes with them racing through a wild, rugged landscape that looks to be far, far away from their dull workplace.
GET ME OUTTA HERE! According to Modernista! creative director/copywriter Joe Fallon, the idea for the spot “came out of the fact that the H3 is the most capable mid-sized SUV in its category and the perfect catalyst for taking you far from the maddening crowd.”
When it came to hiring a director to bring “Escape” and two other Hummer spots to life, Modernista! trusted the aforementioned Bond (who was out of the country and couldn’t be reached for an interview at press time) behind the wheel. “Fredrik’s spots have a great cinematic scope to them. He shoots beautiful film and does epic quite well. That was the first thing that attracted us to him for this project,” Fallon shared.
Additionally, Fallon noted, Bond expressed a desire to pay homage to The Great Escape. “This became integral to his treatment and approach to how he wanted to tell the story,” Fallon said, noting it put the director on the same page as the agency creative team (composed of Fallon, creative director/art director Tim Vaccarino and executive creative directors Gary Koepke and Lance Jensen).
Most of you are likely familiar with The Great Escape. For those of you who are not, the 1963 film directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, James Garner and Richard Attenborough, finds Allied POWs engineering a daring, brilliant escape from a German POW camp.
MAN WITH A PLAN With an escape route of his own mapped out, Bond along with DP Janusz Kaminski shot “Escape” at the Los Angeles Times building in Chatsworth, Calif. Actors Ian Unterman, Ian Brennan and Malcolm Barrett played the escapees, infusing the characters with a sense of both desire and humor.
All in all, the shoot went smoothly, Fallon reported.
Once shooting wrapped, Rick Russell of Final Cut LA cut “Escape” into :60 and :30 versions as well as a :90 version for cinemas. “The main challenge was making sure the linear nature of our story came across in both a :60 and a :30,” Fallon remarked. “There was tons of good stuff we wanted to make sure got in there, so we started with 1:20, then we worked our way backwards. Our editor did an amazing job.”
Those of you who are fans of The Great Escape will notice that the commercial relies on the score from the film. Explaining the decision to use that piece of music as accompaniment rather than compose an original track, Fallon said, “It was just one of those things that came about during the concepting process. We had the basics for the idea–guys at work escape to their H3 to get far away from the office. Once we started pushing the envelope on how far these guys would go to sneak out, the song popped into our heads. And just like that, it opened the door to a dimension that wasn’t quite there yet.”
In Fallon’s mind, “The music definitely made the concept stronger. Plus, the idea of using an iconic piece of music that would have an immediate emotional connectivity to anyone familiar with the film was cool.”
