How Gorgeous Hand-Drawn Animation Told the Nostalgic Story of Toyota Gazoo Racing
So often, only animation can take us beyond reality and into the world of nostalgia. So it was with creative agency HERO’s love letter to all things cars and racing, which is built upon animation in its purest form. In the film, a satisfying stop-motion effect is conjured up with the help of hand-drawn images, copied over and over again and captured at high speeds to create a moving picture. HERO used no VFX, no post, and no green screening to create the effect, achieving a product that might have otherwise been considered impossible.
Somehow, the unique ad comes across as gritty, dark, and polished all at the same time. The campaign leaves you with the smell of burnt rubber and the feeling of a legacy that brings a sense of humanity to the relationship between a driver and their car.
Tasked with celebrating the history of Toyota Gazoo Racing and showcasing the first-ever GR Corolla, The team at HERO wasted no time in diving into the sport’s history. The resulting campaign sees the GR Corolla splashed with mud as it travels at high speeds, moving past the animation stills on the walls and floors of the Calder Park Thunderdome.
To learn more about how this beautifully-crafted spot came together, and the trials and tribulations of its creation, LBB’s Casey Martin sat down with HERO’s ECD Shane Geffen alongside Scoundrel director Toby Pike.
LBB> Animation isn’t something that we see all too often in the automotive category. Why was that the choice that you guys went through to showcase the story of the GR Corolla and Toyota Gazoo Racing?
Shane> This brief wasn't like any other we’ve had in the past. The GR Corolla was commissioned by the former Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda ,One of the things that he was looking for when building and testing the car was “more untamed energy”. That was something we leaned into for this campaign.
The fundamental question we asked ourselves was how do we tell the story of Gazoo Racing, especially when everyone already knows the motorsport history of Mercedes Benz or Audi?
Animation allowed us to tell bits of that story in different increments. The first segment along the wall tells the lineage from the 86 to a rally Corolla. The second animation titled ‘made untamed’, speaks to Akio Toyoda’s philosophy. Then the little zoetrope, with a small cartoon rally Corolla in there. Finally, the last animation segment speaks to how Gazoo Racing merges man and machine.
The animation allowed us to tell the history of Gazoo Racing without the need for a narrator or cut sequences. The most important thing was that the car was the instrument in telling the story the whole time.
LBB> When HERO came to you with the idea of animation, what was your reaction?
Toby> Immediately I thought of a video I saw. A few kids pasted photos of a dancing bear along a wall, rode their bikes past them and filmed on their iphones. They were able to create the animation of the dancing bear in the most simplistic way.
So we ended up using a similar technique, except it isn’t a new and unique way of making animation, it's the oldest trick in the book. I then thought, well, what happens if you change the angle of the camera? Or can we look down on it? It just opened up like a whole world of possibilities. When we jumped into pre-visualization and realised what we could do with the technique and with the location. We knew it would be easier to use CGI but we also knew that if we did we would be losing the essence of the story we were trying to tell.
LBB> Finally, can you talk us through the process of putting the campaign together?
Shane > We wanted the car to be the thing telling the story. There was no post used in creating this spot. It was a lot of problem-solving and trialling out the animation sequence before getting the car and the drivers in for the shot.
We had to work very closely with the illustrator. An animation studio then took James Jirat Patradoon's key concept art and expanded it. For example one segment had around 750 frames, then we had to figure out how far apart we have to stick these still up on the wall and how fast does the car need to be moving for it to animation smoothly. We didn’t want it to be jarring.
It was a lot of trial and error but we knew that we would capture it one way or another, whether it was for real in camera or post - and I'm happy that it was done in camera.
Toby> We weren't really embracing perfection throughout the whole process. The first two hours of each shoot day absolutely poured down with rain.
The rain was just making the first animation sequence of the video more and more transparent. And one of them was peeling off the wall and we had to physically keep re-sticking these things up. Thankfully, it stopped raining and we managed to get the shot. But if you flick to that sequence, you can see little torn edges and semi transparent drawings where the details of the rough wall is coming through. We knew there's no way that CG would be able to create that level of authenticity. So it's all those happy accidents that makes the spot what it is.
We had a few camera technical issues, for example, you can't just point a camera perpendicular to a wall with a car travelling at full speed without getting a huge amount of shutter blur.
That's something that you don't really think of when you're pre-visualising something.
We had to use a specific camera that was able to shoot at a very narrow shutter angle, which meant that each image was crystal clear. It also had to be a global shutter versus a rolling shutter. If you're shooting something moving past the camera with a rolling shutter the image would be slightly slant, whereas using a global shutter illuminates that.
