Cotton balls, cardboard and what-not

Imagine hundreds of motor journalists standing i Geneva gazing at huge monitors while waiting for the CEO of a major car corporation to make his entrance. Imagine it’s your job to get the attention of these journalists. Get their attention, make them come to the booth, and stay there. These motor journalist has just been to the american, italian, french, spanish, and german press conferences.

It’s 3 march 2009, the time is 13.15, and something must go up on the screens. What?

It all started with a photograph, says Anders Hjelmström, vfx artist at Edithouse. Michael Grennard from A+A Corporate Design handed us a picture of seven cars that are part of Volvo’s DrivE concept. Volvo’s PR department hired A+A to be in charge of the press days in Geneva, but on the condition that they wouldn’t show hardly anything of the actual cars before CEO Stephen Odell presented the news. We showed fragments of the picture, but only very briefly. Since a picture is two dimensional, and it was all the material we had to start with, we figured we could build from that and exaggerate the flatness of the image. The idea was born to work with cardboard; build a whole city of cardboard.

Cardboard is recyclable, and many associate environmental thinking with cardboard, mostly due to the fact that we lug it to the recycling center every now and then. Also, many, mostly boys probably, has one time or another built cardboard cities themselves for their toy cars to drive around in. We made a test that we showed the client and they liked the idea. From there we started to gather material. We took a lot of detailed pictures of  cardboard printing as well as cardboard. We used cotton balls as clouds. Co-workers modeled for statues. Then it was cut and paste, in the real world as well as in the computer.

Simultaneously Tobias Marberger, our inhouse musician, started to score the film. We use temp schematics with curves marking the intensity of the film - that way Tobias can be certain the music matches the film and the scheduled program. Our sound designer/editor Medhi Hedayati then added another layer off sound effects on top of that to increase the production value even more. Sound is an extremely important ingredient, and Mehdi is an excellent chef. The check in for the  plane to Geneva was 05.15. We promised to have the film ready 45 min before that. We kept that promise - 04.30 I handed over the tape. 13.15 3 march 2009 motor journalists of the world could see the finished result.

Do you want a glimpse behind the scenes?