Ford with a new style of commercial

When J. Walter Thompson were designing their new campaign for Ford New Zealand they were looking for someone who had experience making cars look good. That’s what WANTED has done over a number of campaigns now, so we got the call.
Initial thoughts for Ford HQ centered around driving footage displaying on the back wall of the studio behind the featured car. But the low lighting requirements of a projector and the high lighting needs of the camera and hero cars were at odds and meant an alternative solution was required.
As pre-production time was getting short it was agreed we’d add in the driving shots and required graphics after the shoot. This would allow the maximum flexibility of finalising that content once all the other on-camera elements were in place.
JWT creative Mike Ramsay and Producer Mary Wall approved a concept that saw this content ‘projected’ between towers that were added into the studio shoot over the top of stand-in props. With everything buttoned down in terms of execution we concentrated on getting our presenter, Shannon Ryan, recorded in front of the shiny new Focus and Kuga vehicles.

Shannon was great to work with and proved once again just how much experienced, professional talent contributes to a project.

With 15-second scripts that were pretty tight on timings Shannon’s ability to deliver consistently across wide, mid and tight shot takes allowed a great deal of flexibility in the editing that followed.
Rocketscience did a nice job on tracking in the ‘projector towers’ and screens and rotoscoping Shannon around these 3D elements. With a bespoke piece of Joost Langeveld music added to the mix the spots finished up looking very clean and modern (if I do say so myself).

Thank you JWT and Ford for letting me help get Ford HQ on the road with a stylish set of television commercials.

(Watch one of the Ford HQ TVCs)

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