The best thing that’s happened to me over the years is that I’m no longer seen as just the car guy. Now, my range is what it used to be in Europe," says director Allan Van Rijn of bicoastal RSA USA. In ’93, Van Rijn helmed "Spikes" (through BFCS’s now defunct Los Angeles office), a much-touted Lexus spot via Team One Advertising, El Segundo, Calif. "Suddenly I was the king of sheet metal. I was cornered. They thought, ‘Ah, this is the new car guy.’ I shot car after car after car," he recalls.
"In Europe, I hardly shot any cars. I was doing storytelling, fashion, children, babies, dogs-you name it," says Van Rijn of the assignments he did prior to moving to the U.S. nine years ago. After "Spikes," Van Rijn, who signed with RSA USA in ’96, was deluged with car assignments for a few years, but the ideas kept getting weaker and weaker: "Any excuse to fill thirty seconds with metal to metal."
The director needed to recharge. One day, rather than doing yet another big-budget auto job, he took a $75,000 PSA called "No Laws" via Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., which promoted charitable giving. Van Rijn said he enjoyed the experience and that it marked the beginning of a new phase in his career. After that, he went back to directing a wide variety of ads for clients such as Visa and Nike.
New Horizon
Van Rijn decided to once again add automotive work to his spotmaking schedule a couple of years ago, "because car commercials have become much more idea-oriented," he explains. "They have become more image-driven. Look at the BMW and the Volkswagen campaigns. You can do a lot more with cars. It became very fashionable to use [directors] who hadn’t shot cars before, like fashion directors. And because I hadn’t shot cars in a long time, suddenly I was rediscovered."
A pair of recent Dodge Neon spots, "Bridge" and "Lover’s Lane" via BBDO Detroit, demonstrate that the director still has a flair for auto ads. The two :30s beautifully illustrate the pun-driven scripts in Dodge’s "Different" campaign. In "Bridge," a Dodge Neon drives onto the middle of a suspension bridge. A voiceover listing the car’s features accompanies exquisite images of the huge structure breaking apart and collapsing, as the Neon apparently weighs it down. Then comes the punchline: "and tons of other stuff."
Similarly, in "Lover’s Lane," a Neon pulls into a secluded spot on a hillside with great nighttime panoramas-the perfect place to take a paramour. The car begins to slowly sink into the ground, uprooting nearby trees. After describing the car’s attributes, the narrator deadpans, "Perfect for those heavy dates."
Surprisingly, both spots were partially filmed in-camera. Except for the CG master shots and a few CG touch-ups, "Bridge" was shot in a seaside parking lot, where hydraulic lifts were used to simulate the car weighing down the bridge. "Lover’s Lane" was filmed in-camera, except for the computer generated nighttime view of the city. Van Rijn says the spot was shot during the day in a studio.
"Mario," part of Milk PEP/Dairy Management’s "Got Milk?" campaign out of Bozell, New York, is a very different Van Rijn spot. The ad features a couple of kids playing a Super Mario video game. Frustrated with the animated character’s inability to make his way up a wall, the kids leave the room. Left alone, Super Mario bursts out of the television set, commandeers a skateboard and heads straight for the fridge. He gulps down some milk, grows larger and heads back into the tube, where he easily walks up the wall in big strides.
Van Rijn says the spot "was an incredible challenge because it could have been very two-dimensional. We tried to make it like a trailer. The lighting is very poetic." One reason for the spot’s distinctive look was Van Rijn’s suggestion that Super Mario "take the light from the television glow with him" when he exits the TV set. The idea was further bolstered by the spot’s sound: Super Mario’s actions in the real world are accompanied by video game sound effects.
Van Rijn says that "you have to have a lot of imagination" for a spot which involves such extensive postproduction work. "The skateboard was CG’d [into the spot] later on. I had to imagine what those shots would look like, and work out the shot without seeing it."
Van Rijn says that different projects bring him on board at different stages, but "the more you work with an agency, the sooner they bring you in. I make the agency part of the whole process. When the idea is weak, I’ll make it executionally strong; when the idea is strong, I’ll work conceptually.
"I worked at J. Walter Thompson [in the agency’s Amsterdam office] for eleven years, so I have an agency background," Van Rijn says. As a director, he is "involved with the creative group from day one. They have found that that helps them enormously, so they quite often call me and say ‘We’ve got an idea. What do you think?’"
A veteran director, Van Rijn feels that he and his ilk are in vogue nowadays. "A lot of agencies went through a period where [they felt that] as long as you knew how to turn on a camera, you were a director. [Now] there is a trend where they’ve come back to more seasoned directors, who are just as edgy, if not more edgy, than the young guys, but [who] have years of experience and [provide] a comfort level to the agency and the client.
"[In] the American market, probably because the economy is going so well, advertising is generally getting so much better," Van Rijn concludes. "There are more and more directors, and the more directors [there are], the better it is for me, because I become more competitive. I have no fear. As a director, you cannot afford to become old. You have to reinvent yourself all the time. You cannot stand still."c
