Challenge: You’re given a major launch to produce on a tight budget. The product’s highlight feature can’t be shown in an ad.

Flint director, Andreas Smetana with post production company, Vandal, and Shanghai agency, Pico Plus, found a way to overcome both these challenges for Continental Tyres. Their original thinking also led to a campaign that is really great to watch.

Continental’s new MaxContact MC6 tyre has top tier handling capabilities on wet or dry roads. The best way to demonstrate this is to show it performing at high speeds on everyday roads. You can’t show that in ads – which posed a problem for the creators of the Australasian brand campaign that would also launch the new tyre.

But you can show someone dreaming about driving at high speeds, provided it’s not live action. So agency, Pico Plus Shanghai, came up with a storyboard in which a driver dreams of racing the car next to him at the lights.

The very relatable dream of racing the car next to him at the lights.

And Flint Sydney director, Andreas Smetana, was given the job of creating that dream using live action and animation, to turn the storyboard into two ads that can be shown – a 60 second film for online and a 30 second TVC.

On a small budget.

“The challenge for us was that this was a large-scale brand campaign for a major tyre manufacturer that had to be made without a lot of money. We had to find nimble and effective solutions all the way through the production to make it work,” stated Tim Berriman, executive producer and managing director, Flint Sydney.

The film was shot with a very small crew over three days in Sydney. Post production company, Vandal, then became the film’s one-stop shop for editing, design, online and sound.

“This turned out to be an invaluable part of making the production run smoothly,” Berriman commented.

It was Smetana’s idea to use an old school comic book style of illustration, to give the finished ad its striking individuality. And the style of Michel Vaillant was chosen as its inspiration.

“If there was a challenge, and in fact the whole post production process was very easy going, it was creating authentic Vaillant illustrations. Back in the day, comic book illustrations were done by hand with pen and ink, not digitally. Second came the challenge of matching the animation to the illustration and handcrafting it into the live footage – again this was never part of the comic book process,” commented Emile Rademeyer, creative director, Vandal.

VFX producer, Steve Dunn, also had to make sure that the pieces were edited together to give the film an exhilarating, energetic pace – but one that was not overbearing. And sound designer, Nigel Crowley, had to devise all the sound from scratch, differentiating the half created for the reality sequence – footsteps, dog barks and car doors – from the half added to the dream sequence – jet engines, rockets and whooshes to compliment the comic-book treatment. Sound was a vital part of the story – as well as the brand promise.

Credits:

Production Company: Flint Sydney

Director: Andreas Smetana

Producer: Tim Berriman

Post Production: Vandal

VFX Producer: Steve Dunn

Creative Director: Emile Rademeyer

Sound Designer: Nigel Crowley

Editor: Sam Bright

Colourist: Tom Meares

Design: Fiona Lu, Melissa Mai, Ling Siu & Julie Ly

Animation: Robert Dinnerville & Jeremy Mansford

Agency: Pico Plus Shanghai

Creative Director: Michael Kaltenhouser

Account Management: Mirabelle Ng & Scott Miao