The Camaro concept car unveiled at last year’s Detroit auto show captured the imagination of Pontiac fan Kevin Morgan. He created a rendering of an ’09 Trans Am from the Camaro concept shape and his illustrations have created quite a buzz among hobbyists and on the Internet. His drawings have even appeared in national car magazines.
It is Pontiac owners and enthusiasts like Morgan that the Pontiac Division of General Motors and Yahoo, Inc! had in mind when they launched an online destination called Pontiac Underground last week. Pontiacunderground.com combines social media content from Yahoo! including Flickr photos, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo!Video and Yahoo! Groups with consumer-created Pontiac content from hundreds of Pontiac fan communities throughout the Web.
Designed in partnership with Boston-based interactive agency Digitas, the site features “Pontiac Informer,” where users can see the latest articles, links and information from other sites about Pontiac, submit their own directly and rate them up or down. Morgan was one of the first to contribute to the online conversation, asking others to help him generate interest in bringing back the Trans Am. He invites people to visit his MySpace page, e-mail him or buy the T-shirt he designed featuring his concept car.
Also on the site, users can view and add to galleries of Pontiac videos and photos of cars. There’s also a place for knowledge sharing. Leveraging the knowledge base of Yahoo! Answers, Pontiac Underground provides a place for users to get the answers they are looking for, as well as share their knowledge with the community.
Pontiac will use the “Inside Track” blog as its primary means of communication with its enthusiast audience. The blog features exclusive news and images directly from Pontiac.
Among the other features on the site is an aggregated list of Pontiac clubs and events, allowing users to connect offline as well.
The site is a key component of Pontiac’s broad community-marketing initiatives for 2007. According to a recent Yahoo! Autos study conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, consumer-generated content is in high demand among car buyers. The vast majority–94 percent–of car buyers who use the web believe consumer-generated content is an important source of information to use when deciding between vehicles. The study’s findings highlight the importance of delivering social media offerings for consumers and automakers alike.
That being said, the new site is poised to be a win-win for Pontiac and consumers. “With Yahoo!’s leading social media platform, it’s exciting to finally be able to bring our GTO fans, G6 fans, Solstice fans, old Firebird or Chief fans, Vibe fans–all Pontiac online communities together,” said Pontiac marketing director Mark-Hans Richer in a statement. “Pontiac Underground is almost all consumer-generated–it’s their community, we’re just trying to add to it.”
Craig Henighan Sounds Off On “Deadpool & Wolverine”
Hollywood lore has it that character actor Edmund Gwenn--while on his deathbed--quipped, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
The second part of that darkly witty utterance remains all too true today as Craig Henighan--a Best Achievement in Sound Mixing Oscar nominee in 2019 for Roma--can attest in that he had to grapple with the sonic of being comic for this year’s box office hit, Deadpool & Wolverine (20th Century Studios/Marvel Studios).
The degree of inherent difficulty was ramped up even further because Deadpool & Wolverine had to seamlessly bring together high action-adventure exploits with moments and dialogue that tickled the funny bone. There’s a mesh of humorous banter--a staple of the franchise--along with major spectacle replete with explosions, fights, an impactful score and off-the-wall musical numbers.
Henighan explained that among the prime challenges for him from a sound perspective was having to make sure every joke landed within the construct of a superhero film. The tendency for a tentpole movie of this variety, he noted, is to gravitate towards big, loud audio spanning music, dialogue and sound effects. But the unique comedic element of Deadpool & Wolverine necessitated that re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor Henighan strike a delicate balance. “You need to get out of the way for the comedy,” he related. The jokes in a superhero film become “a real dance” as Henighan had to establish a rhythm that did justice to both the comedy and the action as the narrative moves back and forth between them--and sometimes the funny and the high energy, high decibel superhero dynamic unfold simultaneously in a scene or sequence. The “sonic fabric” has to... Read More