At www.vwfeatures.com, which recently won a Cyber Lion Award Gold at Cannes, consumers can build their own Volkswagen Jettas and crash test them with everything from a rhinoceros to a chicken truck or create Rabbit models and watch them fall in love and breed. This is not the typical ho-hum “build your own” function on car manufacturers’ Web sites, and that’s exactly what Crispin + Porter Bogusky. Miami, and Digital Domain, Venice, Calif., wanted.
The Crispin team believed the “build your own” category was an underutilized marketing opportunity where more compelling, brand appropriate imagery and messaging could further drive pre-existing TV branding and build relationships between consumers and the cars.
“Every major car manufacturer has a Web site, and for the most part those Web sites tend to be a very clinical display of the various models the manufacturers make. They tend not to resonate with the advertising brand. Or you can click and see the TV commercial on the Web site, but it’s not what it could be,” said Ed Ulbrich, senior VP of production/executive producer at Digital Domain.
“I was literally blown away when we got the brief for the Volkswagen GTI, which has become the building block of vwfeatures.com. It’s revolutionary, and it’s going to set the new gold standard. Crispin has set the bar now and we are honored to be part of it.”
Digital Domain’s visual effects techniques allow customers to “build” cars, which are placed into “Webisodes.” But depending on how you design your car, you get a different experience–so it’s a more interactive experience than a regular Webisode is capable of.
“This is about designing the car and taking that rather mundane experience that isn’t very satisfying into a very strategic way to connect with customers and entertain them, and deliver a consistent message and imagery to the experience they’ve already had of that vehicle, which brought them to the Web site in the first place,” relates Ulbrich.
After choosing the model, body, interior, transmission, wheels and accessories for their Jetta, consumers can choose from eight different ways to crash it. These films correspond with VW’s “Safe Happens” campaign featuring Jettas getting into accidents but keeping their passengers unharmed. The scenes take place in a crash lab and are crafted to look like research footage using multiple camera angles to study the accident.
In the case of the Rabbit, visitors can customize their vehicle but instead of crashing it, they can choose a mate for it and send them both off on a flirtatious ride that culminates with them “parking.” A few seconds later, a family tree pops up.
Because of all the options available through this customized filmmaking experience, this undertaking would be unrealistic without Digital Domain’s visual effects. It would require hundreds of cars and shooting each scene hundreds of times. Instead, the company created the car models, crash test site, animals and objects entirely in CG. From there it animated the scenes and, using proprietary technology, placed each car into the scenes to create the hundreds of possibilities necessary.
“We set up creative elements for one shot and then in the background we have procedures that go out and render all the other various configurations just like the first one,” explained Ulbrich.
He said the most challenging part of the project was having to deploy a substantial amount of Digital Domain’s fire power and arsenal to execute the films because they had to be done in just a few weeks.
“It’s like doing 50 commercials on one tenth of the schedule we would normally get. Logistically it is a substantial endeavor,” Ulbrich related. “It’s about redeploying your resources and deciding for this period of time this project is going to get an atypically large percentage of our computer power. …That’s the benefit of a large environment with significant rendering capacity.”
Looking ahead, Ulbrich says the Web site will continue to grow with more models and describes this period as a “cool time in automotive advertising.
“We are watching in general considerable amounts of money being spent on the Web for automotive. We’re seeing budgets that are not unlike commercial budgets. It’s an exciting time.”
Writers of “Conclave,” “Say Nothing” Win Scripter Awards
The authors and screenwriters behind the film “Conclave” and the series “Say Nothing” won the 37th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards during a black-tie ceremony at USC’s Town and Gown ballroom on Saturday evening (2/22).
The Scripter Awards recognize the year’s most accomplished adaptations of the written word for the screen, including both feature-length films and episodic series.
Novelist Robert Harris and screenwriter Peter Straughan took home the award for “Conclave.”
In accepting the award, Straughan said, “Adaptation is a really strange process, you’re very much the servant of two masters. In a way it’s an act of betrayal of one master for the other.” He joked that “You start off with a book that you love, you read it again and again, and then you end up throwing it over your shoulder,” crediting author Robert Harris for being “so kind, so generous, so open throughout.”
In the episodic series category, Joshua Zetumer and Patrick Radden Keefe won for the episode “The People in the Dirt” from the limited series “Say Nothing,” which Zetumer adapted from Keefe’s nonfiction book about the Troubles in Ireland.
Zetumer referenced this year’s extraordinary group of Scripter finalists, saying “projects like these reminded me of why I wanted to become a writer when I was sitting in USC’s Leavey Library dreaming of becoming a screenwriter. If you fell in love with movies, or fell in love with TV, chances are you fell in love with something dangerous.”
Special guest for the evening, actress and producer Jennifer Beals, shared her thoughts on the impact of libraries. “If ever you are at a loss wondering if there is good in the world,” she said, “you have only to go to a... Read More