Dodge Durango: Hands On Ron Burgundy

 

BMW i3 Electric Car: 360-Degree Interactive Film Just a few days after I posted what was one of the first 360-Degree Interactive Film Examples, this launches… ‘Become Electric’ an Interactive 360-Degree Film created to launch the brand new,BMW i3 Electric Car, and it’s a hell of a launch, I suspect, a car has never been before been released quite like this, across both iTunes and Google Play interactive apps. The story follows a typical Hollywood-style movie, emulating quality too, but once loaded onto your iPhone or iPad, every movement and every interaction lets you dig deeper into the journey and ultimately the car. The ultimate test-drive. Created by WCRS, Mustard Films and Tool.

Golf GTI: Volkswagen Bannerbahn

Dutch agency Achtung created this interactive idea to catch a GTI on the 'Volkswagen Bannerbahn'. It challenges the user to catch a Volkswagen Golf GTI by clicking on it.

http://www.bestadsontv.com/ad/56699/Golf-GTI-Volkswagen-Bannerbahn

Land Rover Unveils Huge TV and Digital Push
Vehicle's Print Ads are Interactive 

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/land-rover-unveils-huge-tv-and-digital-push-152181

Land Rover is launching a considerable integrated campaign this week for its 2014 Range Rover Sport that entails inspiration-minded TV spots, an interactive game called "Race the Sun" and iAds, among other elements. All told, per the brand, the effort—dubbed "Driven To Another Level"—represents the automaker's biggest push ever.

The commercials feature very little copy, letting the viewers focus on breathtaking shots as a Range Rover Sport climbs Pikes Peak. A :30 will debut on broadcast and cable this week, while :60 and :90 versions will appear online. Sister agencies Y&R and Wunderman created the spots, while Mindshare handled the media buying.

"The innovation in the TV spot lies in its story line," said Kim McCullough, Land Rover's North America brand vp. "The spot re-creates the real-life feat that Range Rover Sportachieved when it set the world record for a production-standard [SUV] on the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb course earlier this summer."

In terms of TV, the Range Rover will be featured in branded content on weeks-old Fox Sports 1. The programs will entail two drivers competing in all-terrain contests while commandeering a Range Rover Sport.

The aforementioned Race the Sun game will go live in the next week or so. Accessible via mobile or desktop, the game virtually puts the viewer in the vehicle's driver's seat while experiencing five driving scenarios. Components involve testing different speeds, agility, off-road handling and abilities to check out the vehicle's interior and exterior features.

The Britain-based brand's iAd promos will run on mobile sites for major publishers such as The New York Times, while letting people who click through watch videos and customize a Range Rover Sport. And Web banners appearing on sites such as ESPN.com let viewers virtually steer the vehicle as it weaves through scenic landscapes. Also, Land Rover will sponsor infographics on Slate, appear in ads via The Washington Post's Topic.ly platform and be seen in online promos via Kelley Blue Book.

Land Rover is also investing mightily in print this November while zeroing in on the male demographic. Five-page spreads in Wired, Esquire and Car & Driver will feature image-recognition technology that lets readers wave their smartphone over the ad to get more information about the vehicle on their device.

Other print and banner ads will run in Architectural Digest, The Wall Street Journal and Robb Report. One example of the copy being planned: "All the Most Dominant Species Start Out in the Wilderness."

For McCullough & Co., it's all about interactivity.

"Today, consumers build their opinions of brands based on how they present themselves in digital, social and mobile, as well as the value they offer in these channels," McCullough said. "The most innovative aspect of the digital creative is its interactive nature and [it] enables consumers to actually experience multiple aspects of how the [Range Rover Sport] drives from their desktop, smartphone or tablet."

Spark Social City Online

 ADK Japan and Great Guns INteractive create the most ambitious branching-narrative film ever for Subaru: 'The Big Night' has 172 Individual films

Published in Campaign Brief on 6 June 2013.

Japanese agency ADK and Great Guns Interactive, the interactive arm of global production house Great Guns, have collaborated to create a truly seamless interactive branching-narrative experience for Subaru. 'The Big Night', a bold departure in advertising style for the car giant, follows a young family man's eventful journey in his new Subaru Forester towards the hotel where the 'big night' of the title is to take place. 

The story begins with the accidental destruction of an all-important DVD required for the evening's proceedings. The rest of the story is determined by the viewer, guiding the protagonist through a number of decisions on his way to the hotel, with potentially hilarious results.

Written by the GGi team under the supervision of ADK's Creative Director Miura Yoshihiro and directed by Great Guns' Jeremy Haccoun, whose acclaimed Oppo spots featured Leonardo DiCaprio last year, the film is the most complex narrative-branching interactive experience ever attempted.

"I'd never done anything like this before and, initially, it was quite daunting," states Haccoun. "We had to shoot a 45 page script in a very short space of time. On the one hand, we had to shoot furiously quickly. On the other hand we had to be incredibly precise and careful so as not to break the interactive rules we had set ourselves. Sheridan (Thomas), Great Guns Interactive's co-founder and writer/producer of the film, was insistent from the get go that we didn't have any pauses in the film or any kind of overlaid buttons or prompts on screen to ruin the user experience. Instead all the interactive elements had to be shot in-camera as part of the film's physical world. This meant that we had to get all blocking and timing absolutely perfect, often within only one or two takes, with no rehearsal time. In many ways the process was actually very liberating. We chose, for example, to light the whole room for each set so that we wouldn't waste a second re-lighting between shots. For a director it was really fantastic because I was able to focus on working with the actors for the entirety of each shoot day."

 

"We wanted to do something more subtle than flash huge graphical prompts on screen at each interactive moment" adds Thomas. "When I produced a videogame for Sega a few years ago, I'd been struck by how efficient game designers were at making the user interface so transparent and instinctive. The games industry has been working very hard to do that for more than the last two decades. What stands between you and the experience has been gradually chipped away as the technology and thinking have advanced. I wanted to bring a little of what I'd learned from that into the film world."

"As filmmakers I just don't think we are doing enough to advance the language of interactive film. Not everything needs to be dumbed down. We're dealing with a very savvy, videogame-literate consumer these days, and we shouldn't be afraid to give them a little credit in that respect when it comes to making creative decisions about the content we produce. In that respect this project was certainly a very ambitious and epic undertaking. Thankfully both Subaru and ADK were fantastically supportive of everything we wanted to do at every stage of the process".

So epic was the undertaking that it actually required two Producers to help realise it. "We had three units running at all times", states Jeremy McWilliams, the film's other producer. "One of the earliest choices in the film is whether to get in the Diesel or Petrol models so we had to film every piece of the story from that point onwards twice with both cars! And this is a film with a massive number of permutations - some bold some subtle. In fact, there are 98,304 potential variations of the film. You could technically play the film for 1.68 years continuously and never see the same film twice". 

"We're doing a lot of very subtle things behind the scenes that the viewer may not even realise is customising his or her own experience," adds Thomas. "For example, all choices that you make have an immediate consequence. Do you choose to take the shortcut or sit behind the tractor? But your choices also stack up so that combinations of choices have their own consequences too. They also dynamically affect details like what time the clocks display throughout the film. That in turn changes the mood of the hero or the way that he is greeted when he reaches his final destination.

"There are some pretty wild differences to the way the film plays out. There are over 40 potential endings alone. But there are also plenty of things that just add a subtler flavour to the experience for each player. We wanted to keep the general story and tone the same for all players but give each individual player a chance to make that experience their own. Hopefully that will encourage them to play again to find what else we've hidden in there. For example one of the film's crazier moments isn't even available to you unless you've made the right combination of choices to hit that stretch of road at the right time."

"We've even built Facebook connect into the experience", he continues, "so that not only will a user's profile photo appear in the film but there is also a chance that, given the wrong combination of choices, the user's entire Facebook photo stream might be played to a room full of characters at the film's finale."

"From a technical point of view, I think there's a level of seamlessness with both picture and sound that is quite unparalleled for such a complex film," adds McWilliams. "What people won't realise is that the film is actually made up of 172 individually completed film segments that are streamed depending on their choices. When Sheridan presented the story and mapped out the interactive decision tree, I must admit everybody was a little taken back by the scale of its ambition - even the interactive team. But then we all knuckled down and figured out how to make it happen."

Haccoun, for one, is very proud of the final film and the scope of alternative options it presents. "Although each playthrough will only be somewhere between 8 to 10 minutes depending on the player's decisions, we actually ended up with 46 minutes of finished edited film. To put that in perspective, we shot half a movie."

"I, for one, can't wait to do it again," responds Thomas. "If you think this one was crazily ambitious wait until you see what we've got planned for the next one".

 

Play the Game here: http://www.subaru-global.com/special/2013forester/en/movie.html

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