While Super Bowl advertising sputtered (see page one story), German engineering hums along in "DNA," a :60 for Volkswagen that debuted Jan. 30 in select markets and will see heavy national airtime during the Winter Olympics.
Created by Arnold Worldwide, Boston, and produced and directed by the New York-based PSYOP Creative Collective, the spot portrays the evolution of Volkswagen’s product and image from the 1960s to the present day with an understated graphic elegance and a healthy dollop of subtlety.
"DNA" uses a 100 percent graphic environment to highlight the progress of Volkswagen automobiles over the last 40 years or so. The spot’s illustration manages to remain visually engaging despite its pronounced minimalism; the stars of the commercial are Volkswagen designers and engineers and the cars they create.
A subdued, yet purposeful, electronica track composed by Chris Dyas at Music For Picture, New York, moves the spot along, as a relaxed, but persistent, voiceover guides us though an animated historical montage of Volkswagen automobiles. The ad’s camera motion gives the impression of floating weightlessly through a car designer’s dreamscape.
The commercial opens on a blank white background, with a single black line tracing back and forth across the screen. The line begins to morph into something more complex and detailed, until it finally resolves itself into a designer’s sketch for the Volkswagen Beetle, circa ’65. As a bespectacled designer stands admiring his handiwork, the voiceover asks: "What kind of people finish something, but are never quite done with it?"
The camera moves toward the designer’s clipboard and then backs away to reveal another designer eyeing a VW Micro Bus, which the camera circles once, before pulling back to develop a shot of Volkswagen’s Karman Gia. Next we pan up to view the Karman Gia from above. Our view then comes back down to a shot of a Volkswagen "Thing"—a Jeep-like design produced mostly in the ’70s.
The "Thing" turns out to be an image in the rearview mirror of the Volkswagen Golf, which is illustrated in a new, reddish hue. The Golf gives way to a rendering of the VW Passat. Finally, we zoom in on a green speck on the side of the Passat, which turns out to be a picture of Volkswagen’s redesigned Beetle. The sequence has come neatly full circle.
"Maybe these [engineers and designers] have some kind of weird DNA," the voiceover intones as the camera zooms in on a designer’s glasses. "Well, they sure are smart … smart but kooky."
Zooming in to the glasses, we arrive at the commercial’s final shot of five designers standing by a graphic road, looking off into the distance as a speck of an automobile flies towards them. "I wonder what they’re gonna think of next?," the voiceover concludes, as the shot gives way to a Volkswagen title and logo.
Schizophrenia
To create the spot’s primary look and feel, Arnold turned to Evan Hecox, an independent illustrator based in San Francisco. Recalled Arnold senior art director Adele Ellis: "We’d seen Evan’s work in a book called Schizophrenic, which is a compilation of the work of graffiti artists and skateboard artists and so on … We really liked what he gave us, so the next step was finding someone who could translate his work into three-dimensional animated space."
"Which is where PSYOP came in," noted Tim Brunelle, Arnold’s creative director/copywriter for "DNA." "The great thing about PSYOP," he continued, "is that they’re filmmakers—and so are we—and this makes the bantering back and forth we do a very [creative] experience."
Todd Mueller, a PSYOP creative partner, who along with fellow creative partner Kylie Matulick took a lead role in directing "DNA" for the PSYOP creative collective, recalled that Arnold got his company in-volved early in the creative process—shortly after Hecox’s illustrations were accepted.
"We all realized almost immediately that the spirit of the spot was going to come through in the camera movement: We wanted to be able to effect seamless transitions through time," remarked Mueller, who also said PSYOP worked to combine a ballet-type camera movement with a number of product shots. "We wanted to create one fluid motion throughout the spot, but also get all sorts of key angles on the vehicles," Mueller added.
Matulick expanded on PSYOP’s vision of "DNA," noting: "The idea we came up with for illustrating the historical Volkswagen models with a fluid camera motion was ‘moving out of the past.’ So [in the first part of the spot] most of the camera moves flow away from a particular detail on the car. And then when we begin to feature shots of the more contemporary makes, the main camera movement is a zoom towards a detail … this way the newer cars are shown [moving into the future.]"
In addition to camera motion, color was important to PSYOP’s handling of the spot. According to Matulick, the old Volkswagens are presented in creams, whites and beiges, with " almost a black-and-white print quality." Justin Booth-Clibborn, PSYOP executive producer/producer, noted, "With the Volkswagen Golf, the camera starts moving in, and there’s a big color shift at that point. This is where the reds and then greens appear … We wanted to keep the colors muted and dreamlike at first, so that when we hit the current models, the color scheme becomes much more vibrant."
To achieve its concept, PSYOP relied mainly on XSI, a 3-D software package created by Softimage. Booth-Clibborn indicated that PSYOP was able to work closely with Softimage to achieve the desired look and feel for "DNA." At one point PSYOP was actually allowed to tweak XSI’s code. Said Booth-Clibborn, " We were fortunate to be able to work with [Softimage] to develop the shader that allowed us to be faithful to the illustrator’s look and feel … We pushed the code as far as we could."
From conception to completion, the "DNA" project lasted nearly three months. "The nice thing about animation," conclu-ded Mueller, is that you can keep perfecting every last detail until it’s right." Brunelle agreed, adding, "The whole purpose of this spot was to get people to think about smaller details. In "DNA," the through-line is the Volkswagen designers’ obsession with even the smallest ideas."
Even if their obsession is a little kooky?
"Well," noted Brunelle, "within any car company, the designers often get hidden from everyone else. They don’t really fit into the normal corporate mode, yet they’re extremely important to the whole process. So, yes, they’re kooky … but in a nice way."
