A silver New Beetle whizzes from the streets of New York City to Los Angeles, becoming a low-riding cruiser en route. Next it plows across a lunar landscape, then abruptly rushes through a forest. Then the Beetle is on a rally course, then a race course, then … it wakes up. The Beetle’s been dreaming.
The thought of a sleeping Lexus or Ford seems pretty unlikely, but imaging the nocturnal life of a Beetle is not so difficult. Is it the wide, eye-like headlights with their quizzical steel brows? The round, exuberant body? The fleeting specter of Herbie: The Love Bug?
Alan Pafenbach, creative director at Arnold Communications, Boston, said that "Dreamer" is a departure for the Beetle campaign. Since the car’s introduction two years ago, the ads have featured "the car on a white background, with the type and the music," according to Pafenbach. However, "We thought it was time to take the Beetle out of the soundstage and into the world."
Arnold wanted to show what the New Beetle can do. Inspiration came from Beetle owners themselves, who have been customizing, racing, and rallying their cars throughout the U.S. and Europe. Senior art director Tim Vaccarino explained, "We didn’t really have to try too hard to come up with an idea of what the car can be; people were showing us what this car can do."
Arnold also discovered that Beetle owners develop rather personal relationships with their automobiles. "The car does have a personality; people do think of it as a living thing," Pafenbach insisted. "It’s sort of an action figure, and so we thought it would be just great to have it be a character in its own story. The dream seemed to be a way to connect some of these possibilities into a narrative, to make the car the hero."
With the car as protagonist, people were superfluous. The Beetle’s windows were darkened so that no driver is visible in the spot. "We let the Beetle be the human element," said Vaccarino.
This heightened the degree of difficulty for the director, Kinka Usher, whose spot roost is House of Usher, Santa Monica. Usher said he found making a car the main character "a real challenge." But Beetle owners have no trouble attributing human characteristics to their cars. "People name their cars; people think of them as family members that live in the garage," Pafenbach related.
This notion of a human auto propelled Pafenbach, Vaccarino and copywriter Shane Hutton to the scenario of a car imagining its future. Vaccarino recalled, "It was, ‘What if this Beetle had the personality that people are giving it?’ Show the spot from the Beetle’s point of view, but [don’t] give that away until the end."
The creatives trod carefully in order to make the revelation—conveyed by the car’s blinking as it wakes up—surprising, but not incomprehensible, to viewers. Pafenbach reported, "It was very tricky—how much to give away, how soon. We showed it to a lot of people, and everyone seemed to get it. They’d think it was a trick question, and say, ‘The car’s dreaming, right?’ "
The boisterous jazz music can be traced to none other than Tom and Jerry, said Pafenbach: "For the music we thought, ‘This is kind of like a cartoon.’ It seemed to need some kind of crazy high-energy thing, but something that was a little bit like what you’d hear under a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I just thought the Big Band sound had the right energy; it made you smile and it had a real innocence to it."
In Los Angeles, Michael Sherwood of bicoastal Elias Associates composed the piece, which consisted of drums, upright bass and sax riffs. "Basically it was just coming from a swing band place," he offered. "On the moon, we went for a clarinet solo, which signifies a desert feel." Apparently, "There’s something about a clarinet that sounds sort of Arabian desert, a Benny Goodman jazz thing. …"
Helmer Usher is no stranger to Volkswagen, having previously directed the company’s "Chase," also via Arnold. With "Dreamer," Usher recalled, "Originally they came to me without all the blending of transition elements, going from one scene to another with the wipe of a bus." Although Usher didn’t like the transitions, he was intrigued by the possibilities: "I thought it was the most interesting running footage job I’d ever seen. I’m not necessarily a car-shooter or a running-footage guy, but I liked the idea of being able to do these very interesting live-action transitions without any trickery." So Usher suggested that the viewer be able to see the transitions approach, and Arnold agreed.
The transitions were time consuming and complicated. Greg Everage, producer/executive producer at Santa Monica-based visual effects house R!OT, was in charge of the extensive effects. "All of the transitions were critical to the spot, because we had two environments that had to come together," he said. "The VW bug needed to pass through each environment, so we had to take measurements, use motion control and rigs" to ensure that "each environment was married in perspective per camera angle. For example, the New York skyline is very blue, while the East L.A. skyline is very yellow. At some point we had to have those cross as the car drove."
Setting up the shots proved difficult. Usher said, "The idea of setting up a motion control in Toronto (standing in for New York City), measuring it all, and then setting it up in L.A. and making both cities match perfectly, was very interesting. I’d never seen that before. Usually you use motion control on the set that you’re doing it on. But to actually move the rig all the way to L.A. and all the way to Toronto—you’re traveling four thousand miles to jump the street!"
