Remember Your First Car And Share The Adventures You Had Together...

 

The campaign from Subaru’s agency, Carmichael Lynch, and developed with production partners MINIVEGAS and rehabstudio, is a breakthrough piece of integrated advertising - turning the traditional flow of an integrated campaign on its head by having users’ provide their stories online which are then brought to life by the first-ever, real-time content creation engine, resulting in animated versions of their stories that they can share socially and can be used in the campaign TV Spots, OLA and other extensions. 

 

The interactive experience lives at www.firstcarstory.com.

 

Arriving at the website, users are invited to tell a story about their first car and are greeted by a First Car generator of sorts. This allows users to create a customized illustration of their first car that they can carry throughout their campaign experience by selecting the vehicle style, color, and even adding dings and dents for a shot of well-worn authenticity. All capped off by the sacred naming of the user’s first car. 

 

Users are then invited to enter a story about an experience they had in their first car. As they type their story, the words are matched with animations in real-time. Additionally, they can Tag friends in their story using Facebook connect to draw others into the experience through this shared memory, as well as add a custom voice over and music track to further personalize their tale.

 

These animations are then output as video files to create the user’s animated short, which they can share online.

 

To further extend the experience, users drive their first car they created when they arrived at the site around an interactive story map, which allows users to explore stories similar to theirs and to view animated shorts uploaded by their Facebook friends - creating a rich and nostalgic experience.

 

The story generator, the brain child of production partner MINIVEGAS uses their proprietary software, Atlantis, to create the animations in real-time, dynamically turning words into custom animated shorts. It uses a database of over 25,000 words, and matches words with a library of over 30 minutes of custom animations that were created specifically for the project. The challenge was developing a piece of technology that analyzes the typed story and animates it from shot to shot in a unique narrative structure in real-time, while also being able to support a large number of streaming users. 

 

And while the technology driving this experience is incredibly advanced, an illustrator drew each creative element by hand for the animated shorts, as this allows us to bring each user’s first car story to life in an accessible and interesting way that feels very personal.  

 

And as a testament to the quality of the animations, the same engine MINIVEGAS built for the site is rendering the broadcast spots for this campaign as well. In the coming weeks, users who share their story on the site could see parts of their animated short on TV.

 

Luc Schurgers, Creative Director and Founder at MINIVEGAS said of the work “This is the first time a user generated campaign has created original, animated stories based on user input. Creating an animated short in a matter of seconds is a breakthrough moment in content creation... We were able to accommodate these challenges through advanced cloud computing and extending our proprietary software, Atlantis.”

 

Ellen Utrect, Exective Producer at MINIVEGAS added "In sum, we had over 25,000 words and 30 minutes of digital animation created to support the high volume of rendering calculations. We also built a flash intake mechanism that communicates with our software as soon as the page loads, and key words interact even in the earliest moments of user input. The end result is users’ personal stories brought to life in a matter of seconds, as opposed to taking minutes to generate.”

 

rehabstudio designed and built the site framework and created interactive features such as the story map.

 

Experience it for yourself at www.firstcarstory.com and take one last ride in your first car.

 

Agency: Carmichael Lynch

Chief Creative Officer: Dave Damman

Executive Creative Director: Randy Hughes

Creative Director: Ben Steward

Associative Creative Director: Conn Newton

Digital Designer: Andy Lund

Junior Writer: Tim Bildsten

Director of Integrated Production: Joe Grundhoefer

Director of Interactive Production: Peter Albrycht

Senior Interactive Producer: Petra Boden

Senior Content Producer: Freddie Richards

Interactive Producer: Aneela Idnani

Director of Business Affairs: Vicki Oachs

Senior Project Manager: Lisa Brody

 

Animation generator, Illustration, Art Direction

 : MINIVEGAS

 

Interactive Design & Production : rehabstudio

 

Online Editorial/Mastering: Drive Thru

Smoke/Online Artist: Derek Johnson

Editor: Nick Miller

Executive Producer: Beth Wilson

 

Audio Post: BWN

Sound Design: Ryan Terrell

Mixer: Carl White

Producer: Annie Sparrows

 

Music: Black Iris

 

Production Partner Management : Aarra