Toughness, in the world of pickup trucks, is commonly considered the domain of American-made vehicles. In the ads, the trucks are driven by honest, hard-working cowboy types who load and unload the building blocks of America’s heartland from the beds. However, there is another kind of toughness: one born in the city’s streets. And knowing that there is more than one way to sell a pickup truck, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, kicked off the third year of its campaign for the Nissan Frontier with a spot that plays with the perceptions of toughness.
"[In the first year of the campaign], aesthetically the spots took a tougher approach, with the exposed rivets and all that," explained TBWA/Chiat/Day creative director Chris Graves. "Still, the whole point of the first early work was to stay away from the cliché of loading fence posts into the back."
Successfully avoiding this Marlboro Man image, TBWA/ Chiat/Day is giving its client a chance to compete in a tight race for truck buyers by being different. "The Frontier is a more gritty, urban kind of powerful, versus the country-western kind of toughness, and we cut out a little bit of a niche that way," continued Graves. "The second year had a little more story to it, but this year we had an opportunity to put the truck into a big cinematic situation, as well as to add a sense of humor to [the pickup truck image]."
"Flying Saucer" was helmed by British director Gerard de Thame, out of bicoastal HSI Productions, and posted at London’s The Mill. (De Thame is represented by both HSI and his own London-based Gerard de Thame Films.) The spot strikes a balance between Star Wars and a gag from a Road Runner cartoon. Shot in the mountains of northern Wales, the nighttime scene is ominous and surreal.
In the opening seconds there is a palpable feeling of dread. We hear the sound of heavy machinery snapping to attention and witness a vacillating, white beam of energy encircling a gnarly tree. A powerful hum vibrates in the air. A snow owl, sensing danger, flaps away from its perch, letting loose a couple of hoots to warn its fellow woodland creatures. The glowing white rings of energy that make up the beam, work to uproot the tree. Split seconds later the tree is in midair, fated for an illuminated entrance into the underbelly of a flying saucer.
A bulldozer is next, and it creaks and moans against its own massive gravity as the tractor beam grabs hold. It, too, is sucked into the ship, and once it’s safely tucked away we are given a fleeting opportunity to survey the spacecraft. Clearly missing its "We come in peace" bumper sticker, this ship is obviously not gathering earthly objects for science, but, very likely, ingredients for some super weapon to eradicate all life on our planet. Scratches and interplanetary grime on the ship’s hull suggest it has seen a few space tussles, and its protective design hints that perhaps it is not from the most hospitable of worlds. Momentarily hovering over the scene, it suddenly takes up the chase for the Nissan Frontier that winds its way down a dirt road.
The truck bounds through its inhospitable setting. As the alien destroyer moves overhead, a full orchestra strikes up to foreshadow the helpless Frontier’s demise. The soundtrack, similar to the theme used for industrial settings in Chuck Jones cartoons, still maintains a larger, more serious tone. The coexisting expectations for humor and drama create an unsettling feeling.
We hear the same machinery snap, the same powerful hum—and see the same conical beam fix on the truck, but this time the Frontier drives along unaffected by the spaceship’s efforts. The ship’s engines strain but, again, nothing—the truck takes control. As the pickup speeds through a mountain pass, the saucer is clearly losing stability. It lurches into the canyon wall, knocking loose some boulders. The truck turns onto a highway and the ship, now fully out of control, is dragged behind, spewing sparks. Then the Frontier barrels into a mountain tunnel and the spacecraft, far bigger than the entrance, hits hard. A creak, a flicker from the cockpit light, and, finally, utter loss of all power—the great flying machine is dead.
For this spot a good deal of thought went into the look of the rough ‘n’ ready spacecraft. De Thame made certain that the alien ship was not a visual cliché. "Gerard put an effort into reinventing the flying saucer and creating a saucer that no one has seen before, using ‘new flying saucer technology,’ " joked Graves. "We had long conversations about the ship. It had to be an intense and powerful piece of machinery, plus it had to have the interplanetary road grime. It is definitely a battleship and not an explorer."
"We talked about things that could suck up, and we looked at fifties vacuum cleaners as our starting point," de Thame shared. "We liked the idea of it being a really tough spaceship that had been around a while. I think that helps the idea, because if [the saucer] looks tough and rugged, it makes the truck look like more of a hero."
"Flying Saucer," presented some unique production and postproduction challenges, since the setting was neither where the action took place nor even when. "All the backgrounds were shot day for night," said de Thame, as he described the filming technique of adjusting the exposure on the camera so sunlight appears more like moonlight. "It was a neat way of creating very big landscapes."
Plus, according to the director, actually lensing the action in the mountains of northern Wales—especially at night—would have been prohibitive. The wind, the impossible lighting conditions on the huge vistas and the inhospitable weather forced de Thame to come up with another solution. He would have to shoot the landscape and the truck separately and composite them together in post: "… we combined the daytime plates that are made to look like night with real nighttime shooting on the car. So there was a clever balancing act by the director of photography, Mick Coulter, between the two scenes."
However, despite efforts on the parts of the director and DP, the color matching and compositing presented their own set of challenges. "The thing is, we really wanted to get some depth to it," explained Mill Inferno artist Dave Smith. "We didn’t want all the rock faces to be completely black. So it was a case of making sure we still had some detail there and some detail in the sky. Instead of just grading down the whole plate, it was a case of grading bits of the rock, bits of the sky. So there was a lot of combining just on the background plates, and trying to match the perspective and get some depth to it."
To make the action look like it was actually taking place in the mountainous setting, roads had to be recreated. "I picked all the backgrounds that I liked and then we had [the territory] properly surveyed by land surveyors," de Thame explained. "From that we made maps based on the land and we reproduced those contours on an airfield, so that when we put it together the car looks like it is really sitting into that landscape."
"We shot the car in the airfield first, which was done at nighttime," added Smith, who stressed the importance of The Mill’s involvement with the production and pre-production. "We were very concerned about noting the camera angles, lenses and all the dimensions, because we knew that we would have to replicate that shot for the background in a different location. Then a week later we went to this slate quarry in Wales. We had a mix and overlay package, which is to say that we could see what was shot for the foreground, and we had to look around and choose a bit of scenery that was going to match fairly seamlessly to the foreground."
De Thame is known for his unique automobile spots. His credits include Volkswagen’s uncanny trip down a New Orleans street in "Synchronicity," through Arnold Worldwide, Boston; Jeep’s impression of a wet dog in "Shake," out of PentaMark (now BBDO Detroit), Southfield, Mich.; and Mercedes-Benz’s sedans on a ride with Noah in "Modern Ark" via Merkley Newman Harty|Partners, New York." Besides being car spots, all these ads share something in common: None of them features 80 mph trips down wet roads or 180-degree controlled spins. Rather, each works hard to brand the car—and "Flying Saucer" is no different. "De Thame’s level of expertise in special effects is very high," said Graves. "For a spot like this, you have to pick someone who is seamless."
