The Renault 5 is back. And what a commercial Publicis Conseil has given it to announce that. It’s 110-seconds of riveting intrigue – and athleticism – as a man climbs a mountain of abandoned Renault cars. Try not to watch until the end.
The Renault 5 was the brand’s most famous model and best-selling car in France in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It stopped being produced in 1984. Forty years later, Renault considers its re-launch is an event.
The new R5, however, was redesigned from scratch – 100% electric, using resourceful materials, with a visionary design. Renault considers it a revolution and if you want to make a revolution, you have to leave everything you used to be behind you.
The hero commercial of the campaign, R5volution is a french thing,directed by Sebastian Strasser and produced by Henry, tells that story.
The mountain was created by assembling 120 wrecked Renault cars that were found all over Argentina. It was 10 metres high and had 3 climbing sides. Like a real Tetris game, they were assembled with real attention to shapes, colours and parts of the structure that permitted to do impressive stunts. The leading actor was supervised and doubled by an artistic director from Le Cirque du Soleil.
CGI was used to extend the mountain around the real structure, bringing poetry and magic to this world. More than 72 Renault 3D models were used. Lipstick, the post-production company then had to create a specific VFX tool that allowed them to pile the cars up organically, and calibrate the amount of damage, rust, or missing parts of cars.
