It was an unorthodox creative process that led to the making of the MINI short film The Best Test Drive Ever. Period.
It all started with a contest created by ageny Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners (BSSP)–and inspired by SMITH magazine editor Larry Smith’s six-word memoir project–that called on MINI fans to sum up the components of the best test ride ever in a mere half-a-dozen words.
The goal was to activate MINI’s loyal consumer fan base and create some buzz around the newest MINI, the 2012 John Cooper Works Coupe. And it worked–more than 14,000 people entered the contest.
BSSP then chose the most imaginative entries and distributed them to directors, telling them, “We’re going to make this test drive happen, and we’re going to document it. We don’t know what it’s going to be. What’s your vision for it? We just left it really open, and we got a lot of interest,” said BSSP’s Steve Mapp, who served as co-creative director on the project. “Ultimately, it came down to a treatment we got back from director Erich [Joiner].”
Joiner, who was thrilled to have the opportunity to conceptualize a film from scratch, was drawn to an entry that read: “Stewardess. Salt flats. Sushi. Paratroopers. Falconer.”
From that, he came up with a wild test drive that has a man careening through city streets with a sexy stewardess at his side, speeding up a ramp and taking flight, magically landing in the middle of salt flats where he dodges paratroopers, skids through a sushi restaurant, screeches to a halt in front of a stage being rocked by a band called Falconer, and emerges from the MINI to raise his arms in triumph after taking the best test driver ever. Period.
Actually, as director Joiner–who’s with production house Tool of North America–had originally envisioned the film, there was a real falconer in the mix.
But when it was discovered that there was a Swedish rock band called Falconer, well, neither Joiner nor the agency could resist. Unfortunately, the band couldn’t appear in the film due to travel issues, but Joiner cast real musicians who captured the look and feel of Falconer to play the rockers, and an original Falconer tune composed by Robert Etoll is featured in the film.
Behind the wheel The real star, though–aside from the MINI–is Mathew Foster. He is the guy you see behind the wheel of the MINI, and he is the Portland, Oregon-based graphic designer who submitted the clever entry upon which the film is based.
Both BSSP and Joiner tried to make the experience as fun as possible for Foster.
“I had him do as much of the driving as I possibly could,” Joiner said, turning over the wheel to a professional driver in scenes where the car was going incredibly fast.
While Foster had a blast, Joiner said he had a great time, too, as he created the over-the-top experience he chronicles in his treatment. The director especially enjoyed shooting in the salt flats. (Well, actually, the “salt flats” scenes were shot outside of Mojave, Calif., in a dry lakebed because there was standing water on the Bonneville Salt Flats.)
“We had a helicopter and paratroopers, and we were drifting the car, and we had a band, and I built a whole sushi restaurant out there,” Joiner recalled. “It was a lot of fun.”
There were some effects involved in the making of the film, with the bulk of them going into the sequence in which the MINI drives up the ramp and makes that epic jump.
The ramp was built on a street in downtown Los Angeles, and later extended in postproduction by the visual effects crew at The Mission in Venice, Calif. Joiner shot plates of the car hanging in the air so the effects company could make it seem as though the car took flight. “We had a huge crane, and we built a custom cradle, so when the car was hung, the suspension dropped out of the wheel wells, and it looked like it had really gone airborne,” Joiner shared.
ALEXA The director and DP Mark Plummer shot the bulk of the film using two Arriflex ALEXA cameras.
“I’ve been using the ALEXA on a lot of shoots lately and really have loved working with it for a lot of different reasons,” said Joiner. “The quality is great, and you’re not having to reload the mag. It’s going to these two memory cards, and you can go for quite some time.”
The ALEXA also performs well in low light. “The ALEXA and the really high-end HD cameras don’t need as much light, so that scene you see at the end with Falconer and the fireballs and all that stuff, it would have been hard to do that with film because that was shot at dusk, and the sun was down,” Joiner said.
Pete Koob of BSSP’s in-house Cleaver Editorial cut Joiner’s footage into a two-minute version for YouTube as well as a :90 version for cinema with 5.1 surround sound.
Joiner gave Koob a lot to work with, Mapp added, noting, “There was no shortage of beautiful car shots. Erich does that better than anyone.”
