Smash it up
ATTIK and Shilo have released an animated spot for the Scion xD, part of a larger Brand Manifesto cross-media campaign.
The Scion xD “Explosion” TV spot, which launches the Scion Brand Manifesto, was directed by ATTIK’s co-founder and creative director Simon Needham in conjunction with Shilo.
Working with Scion, Needham and his colleagues created numerous model-specific campaign assets for the xD, xB and tC ranges, each featuring its own font, style treatment and set of manifestos reflecting the vehicle’s unique ‘personality’.
The animated fruits of this labour include the xD “Explosion” and forthcoming tC “Streaks,” spots in conjunction with Shilo, with Needham teaming up with Imaginary Forces to direct xB “Splicer.” The spots feature custom scores from Face the Music, and were all finished at Method Studios.
For the Shilo collaboration, creative direction was provided by Shilo co-founder and creative director Jose Gomez and associate creative director Evan Dennis. Shilo’s team worked with ATTIK’s in-depth campaign positioning information, a detailed script, and moodboards conveying each vehicle’s manifestos with suggestions on photographic and graphical styles, colours, textures, and typography.
“ATTIK’s brief for this project was pretty interesting, in that each car has an animation technique associated with it that speaks to the character of the car itself,” said Gomez. “For the xD, its animation has this shard-like quality reflecting the sharp angles of the car’s design. We find it really interesting when the animation itself speaks to the nature of the subject at hand.”
With the goal of finalizing the look and feel of the spots, Shilo’s artists began the project workflow by creating an animatic. “Getting everyone happy with the storyline itself was the first big step. Once we had the edit locked, we moved forward in refining the animation in the action taking place, as well as the camera moves. At the same time, we also created a motion test to present the spot’s final look and feel. With approval on that, in this case, all the rendering, compositing, and colour came from Method Studios.”
“With this Brand Manifesto campaign, we’ve found some fun and exciting ways to invite even more trendleading, creative individuals to participate in the brand’s unique philosophy of ‘vehicle as self-expression,’“ Needham began. “For the new TV spots, our creative focused on finding dynamic ways to convey each vehicle’s personality, and connecting those with individuality. Shilo really impressed us with their past work on ‘Fable’ and numerous other great Scion films, as did Imaginary Forces on the recent Samples campaign spot; they really get into the personality of their creations, and that spirit transfers to the screen.”
“Method’s finishing has added a lot of realism to the incredible CGI content created at these studios,” he continued. “And our friends at Face the Music are proven partners when it comes to creating phenomenal sound treatments to represent Scion and its models.”
As well as this 30-second TV spot for the Brand Manifesto campaign launch, ATTIK’s integrated scheme for Scion also includes billboards and print ads, as well as two key campaign assets online: custom microsites offering audiences innovative ways to participate in Brand Manifesto.
The first, Pixel Reveal, invites visitors to register to win a highly customized Scion, and to visit the site every day to remove more pixels; as the number of registrants and daily visits climb, the million-pixel site will reveal more of the grand prize Scion, which will be awarded to the registrant revealing the last pixel. The second site, entitled Speechifier, allows visitors to enter their own manifestos to automatically generate video versions of their messages using a montage of video clips. Personal manifestos created at the site can then be embedded into social media sites.
Metadata
Title: Scion xD “Explosion”
Client: Scion
Ad Agency: ATTIK
Creative Director/Co-Director: Simon Needham
Associate Creative Directors: Ron Lim, Stan Zienka
Production Company: ShiloDirector: Simon Needham (ATTIK) and Shilo
Creative Director: Jose Gomez
Associate Creative Director: Evan Dennis
Lead Designers: Evan Dennis, Jose Gomez
3D Animation: Cody Smith, Jesse Franklin, Henning Koczy, Gene Arvan Editor: Adam Bluming
Production Coordinator: Katlin Bradley Producer: Jake Hibler
Executive Producer: Santino Sladavic
VFX and Finishing: Method StudiosSenior Executive Producer: Gabby Gourier
Producer: Leighton Greer
Visual Effects Supervisor: Chris Nichols
Compositing Supervisor / Lead Compositor: Chris Bankoff
Flame Artist: Marguerite Cargill
Lighting Supervisor: Daniel Buck
CG Artists: Scott Metzger, Felix Urquiza, Alexander Lee, Didier Levy, Dave Carlson, Erik Lee
Nuke Compositors: Ryan Raith, Jake Maymudes
Coordinator: Lauren Haggard
Music and Sound Design: Face The MusicExecutive Producer: Adam Joseph
Composer/Sound Designer: Matthew Kratz
Additional Sound Designer: Michael Schmidt
Mixer: David Carden