Motion / Nissan ‘Qashqai’

BRIEF
This Nissan Qasqhai campaign was commissioned by TBWA London to create a series of images under the tagline 'Urban proof'. The brief for each scene, required uniquely designed city buildings and architecture, in carefully juxtaposed ‘Trompe l'oeil’ effects, to describe the key features and capabilities of the car, in these very creative and fun concepts.

OUR ROLE
From rough layouts, we developed each concept to add more creative depth to the designs. Each idea had to work on several levels, fitting the theme of the concept, bring the buildings to life as characters and integrating and overlapping them in a credible way creating convincing ‘Trompe l'oeils’.

PRODUCTION/SOLUTION
The 3 final concepts were, ‘Family’ ,‘Bose’ and 'Toughness'. 'Family' - showed a family of buildings loading the boot, to highlight the Qashqai’s storage capacity and seating space. Each building was designed to represent a member of the family, mum with her handbag, Dad with his briefcase, the young and his dog and even a grey hair Grandad – along with shopping bags, presents, golf clubs all cleverly designed into the cityscape of buildings. 'Bose' - Where all the buildings were designed to a musical theme to represent the Nissan's Bose sound system. An immense amount of detail went into the design of the building, with layer upon layer of musical references. There’s lots to be found, from guitars and trumpets, amps and microphones, pianos, drums, iPods and more. Even the architraves were sculpted with ‘Treble Clef’ symbols and musical notes in their design and buildings peppered with knobs and dials from various music related equipment. ‘Toughness’ was designed to highlight the Qashqai’s handling and durability within a tough city environment. Depicted in a dark gritty urban street, we had a lot of fun working with the many different aspects of the city coming to life and attacking the car. From menacing buildings, with eyes suggested by pigeons and plant pots, to diggers taking on the form of a scorpion ready to strike. We had a lot of free reign when it came to the design, and all of the creative’s had an idea included somewhere – from the obvious effect of the hammer to the more subtle details of the shark puddle and cobweb. The overall piece was 90% CGI, with some supporting photography shot by Garry Simpson, for the distant buildings and photographic textures. All of the elements in the shot were otherwise designed and built from scratch in CGI, which allowed us to re-use all of the same CGI assets for the 45 Second animation. Recycling CGI assets in this way makes perfect sense for the client, ensuring a lot of cost saving and scales of economy in production as well as guaranteed consistency of quality and brand across all the campaigns advertising. The freedom and detail of the design within each shot would not have been possible without using CGI. This was the first time Nissan had commissioned a CGI print production on this scale. The campaign was running Pan European, press and outdoor poster (48 & 96 sheets) so to ensure the best reproduction to such large sizes, each shot was built to over 17,000 pixels, with an immense amount if detail. Being new to the CGI process, the agency and client found our unique REALWorld Rendering™ workflow invaluable. Guiding them through the clear 5 step process, from design and concept, modelling, textures and lighting and then final rendering made the whole process easy for them to understand and give key feedback at the right time.

RESULT
We created three stand out images for the Qashqai campaign, full of rich and interesting detail to entice the viewer to look deeper. The agency and client were very impressed with the final quality, alleviating any fears of the CGI process, and ultimately showing how with the right planning and approach CGI can be a very cost effective and flexible solution, allowing for reuse of assets across print and animation.