Online campaign for the worldwide launch of AUDI’s first super sportscar R8.
One of the most successful project i ever worked on: the online campaign for the 2006 launch of the new AUDI R8. While working at the argonauten, Berlin, we had the chance to pitch for that mouth-watering project. We won the pitch by following the same strategy as we did for the final launch version. The strategy: no long copies, no complex structure of the site – just the focus on the Beauty in form of a interactive movie.
Since we weren’t delivered with any campaign material this time, we had to generate our own. RTT – a CGI firm specialized in realistic car rendering – was deeply involved in the storyline and put their best staff on the schedule. As always, timing was short, so we needed to make sure, that parallel working would seamlessly be possible. The amazing soundtrack made the whole experince complete.
The journey begins on a racetrack at dawn with the LED lights flashing on
As a dramatic soundtrack orchestrates, the car suddenly rushes on the track…
At certain time-freezed moments, everythings seem to stand still
Then suddenly the journey continues, this time thorugh a cityscape
The scenarios are fracturing slowly and descend to another setting
At certain breakpoints the user can pause the movie and retrieve additional details
The last shot is a hangar with the R8 sliding in, where the user can customize colors, rims and sideblades
A lookboard described and visualized the special artifical look we wanted to achieve for our setting.
We all started by scripting a cinematic plot around the car, driving a few fictive scenarios representing the DNA of the car: it’s racing heritage, design, performance. A tv-comercial with a shattered view on a city gave us the initial idea to seamlessly combine the different locations and it’s looks. We also insited to play with speed and time. This resulted in the so called “bullet-time” transitions, where the user has the option to pause the movie and to dive into deeper information.
As the client AUDI always insist on an accurate and realistic apperance of their car, the CGI output was quite a challenge. Of course, all final rendering processes require a very long time. Therefore we worked with a sequence of single shots, a so called animatic. This gave us the possibility not only to get all the coordination with the client and product maketing done, but also to start flash production and programming at the same time.
