Nissan

Nissan sell more colourful cars in the UK than anywhere else which led to the creative team at TBWA leveraging that fact to create their ‘Make Life Pop’ concept. Bold colours and Japanese inspired patterns augment and enhance the people and environments these cars drive through, giving a ‘pop’ of bold colour in their wake. Working collaboratively with TBWA, we layered and reconstructed buildings, landscapes and clothing items to map colours and animated patterns to surfaces and create a satisfyingly saturated palette.

‘Make Life Pop’ was the base message and the creative team at TBWA had some bold ideas on how to make that happen; augmenting existing commercials with patterns, animation and block colours to reinvigorate, repurpose and re-format some existing Nissan spots and uplift an upcoming sales event.

We were tasked with creating 2x20s edits and 4x cutdowns of 4 separate cars, creating bespoke cuts and subsequent animations for each one, tracking, animating and replacing backgrounds to create fully immersive animated scenes that are revealed by the cars themselves.

The early initial brief was very much a work in progress, with TBWA trying to nail down exactly what creative would work best for the idea and the client but after a few conversations and a couple of tests we helped them to visualise and refine the creative vision and provide a solution that was dynamic and more importantly BOLD.

After Effects heavy, this project required us to track and map the surfaces of each shot before replacing and creating our own colour filled compositions using TBWA’s ‘Memphis style’ references. Each car needed a different look and feel while keeping that cohesive thread, with each one providing its own technical challenges from pixel perfect tracking to breaking the hearts of our comp team with tiny detail roto.

It was a truly collaborative process which involved adjusting and pivoting when required, amending creatives that weren’t quite working, animating logos and creating key visuals for the TBWA team to repurpose for their various deliverables, helping them bring the client along on the creative journey and ultimately selling the idea more easily.

4x cutdowns of 4 separate cars, creating bespoke cuts and subsequent animations for each one.

The different mattes provided by the VFX team to integrate colours and patterns with After Effects.

“Special shout to Lise for basically being client, art director and motion artist all wrapped into one.”

Message from the boss