Old dog taught new trick – sell cars

They say never work with children or animals but when a script comes in with the title ‘Man’s new best friend’ you can be sure the later will be a part of the shoot.
FCB Auckland is an agency that’s enjoying great success both creatively and commercially and therefore, an organisation I was keen to work alongside. The concept involved positioning the new Storm variant of the Holden Colorado as man’s new best friend, and I was keen to bring it to life.

I’m big on cars and making them look as tasty as possible on-screen so this concept suited me perfectly.

The other key component to the story was man’s previous best friend – the dog. Reconnecting with Mark Vette’s Animals on Q saw us cast Bo as our male lead.
Shoot day went well with initial efforts directed toward getting the dog’s actions covered off successfully. It was imperative that the dog showed a continuum of emotions in his performance. As the various features of the Colorado Storm are revealed he needed to progress from being a relatively happy pooch, through a growing sense of discomfort, and finally to looking completely down-trodden and dejected. With only his body positions really available to demonstrate these emotions I’d instructed the trainers to concentrate on getting Bo to move from standing with his ‘happy face’ on, to sitting down looking anxious (swallowing), and then hanging his head to finish slumped on the vehicle’s front seat. Bo was trained and rehearsed for the week prior to the shoot and it paid off with multiple shot options being recorded relatively quickly on the day.
Once the dog was wrapped it was onto the hero car. Blessed with perfect weather we used both the early morning and late afternoon natural light for the wide shots and re-tuned our lighting resources through the middle of the day to record close-ups.
Tidy off and online edits were followed-up by some fine colour-grading by Andrew Brown at Toybox along with a little removal of unwanted reflections to complete some stunning visuals. The audio was sorted by Liquid Studios and the final graphic animations added by FCB’s in-house graphics studio.
A thoroughly enjoyable project to be involved with and one that I trust will serve FCB and Holden NZ well. Good boy, Bo.

(Watch Man’s new best friend)

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