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Jonathan Zawada, Shane Sakkeus and Collider have joined forces to create a new video clip for music darlings ‘The Presets’ that partners the use of the song in BMW’s TVC for their new Series 1 vehicle launch.

BMW Series 1 campaign

The new Series 1 campaign
Since the 1970s, German car-maker BMW has, as part of its sales and marketing campaign, including an Art Cars programme where famous artists have been invited to paint BMWs. Likewise, film directors have been invited to make short films, each featuring a BMW. In a highly competitive global market BMW promotes its products as clever, stylish, sexy, superbly engineered and highly desirable, to a broad buyer profile. Its latest marketing concept on video is an eye-popping, futuristic, roller-coaster of digital engineering. BMW has pushed its own boundaries in an effort to boost its image with a younger, financially-mobile target market for their new Series 1 vehicle launch. By directly seeking relevance with this demographic, BMW hopes to win world wide returns.

This new commercial is a large collaborative project, selecting the best in Australian music, design and creative direction, together with the input of a French remix expert. Are you the one? by Sydney electro outfit The Presets, remixed by Lifelike, was commissioned by Modular People for BMW. Invited on board as creative directors were Jonathan Zawada  – a regular collaborator with The Presets – and Shane Sakkeus, two talented Australian print designers. The Sydney-based design and film collective, Collider, were asked to work with Zawada and Sakkeus to produce the video.

Design in motion
On making the leap from print design to music videos for The Presets, Zawada says, ‘I’ve worked on a couple of their music videos in the part in an art direction capacity, and in my development of their other visual material I’ve always endeavoured to construct a sort of universe to accompany the music that could then give rise to numerous stories within it.’
However, the TVC is not a simple music video – it involves compositing, 3D animation, motion graphics and visual effects – so did this present a greater challenge to the print designer?
‘I think the type of execution we opted for, 3D animation, was a really sympathetic way to ease into direction motion…as the controlled environment it provides allows for a fairly familiar work method,’ says Zawada.

BMW Series 1 campaign

Creating a new universe
Described as ‘optical bliss’, the video takes us for a spectacular ride on highways suspended over a galactic landscape. Traversing through parallel worlds of rainbow moon rocks, pyramids and cosmic clouds, thousands of animated BMWs or ‘The Ones’ navigate the heavens and earth alike.
Zawada and Sakkeus designed the environments which could then be flooded with thousands of moving vehicles.
Zawada explains that the idea was partly inspired by the fantasy worlds of computer games:
‘The idea of recording multiple [car] races and playing them back simultaneously is a feature of an online car racing video game called Trackmania and we really wanted to explore this idea and expand its possibilities into a vast and mythical environment of our own construction.
There seemed to be an almost infinite array of visuals that could be created by playing with the ideas of gravity, inertia and simple physics that became mesmerising and fantastic when massively multiplied.’
He believes that this concept complements The Presets’ sound and image well: ‘The world that The Presets inhabit in all of their artwork has always been a bit mythical and we really wanted to extend that universe as far as it could go in the worlds we created for the cars.’

Enter Collider
Once the concept for the project had been developed, Collider were responsible for the technical side of the project. They were able to create the programme effects which could animate each one of a thousand cars in each scene. On working with Collider, Zawada recalls a rewarding learning experience.
‘Collider really were a pleasure to work with. They were really helpful with developing out ideas along the way and figuring out ways to realise what we had in our heads. Not really knowing a great deal about CG animation, we initially approached them with a kind of rough sketch of what we were after in broad strokes, and they helped steer us in the directions of what was possible. The restrictions we ended up with were really due to the fact that the video is only three minutes long and I think we really had worlds in our heads that could have accommodated a half hour epic!’

BMW Series 1 campaign

The result of this creative collaboration between Zawada, Sakkeus, Collider and The Presets is a highly imaginative visual feast. For BMW, its production line now takes on a market of cosmic significance.

Anne Paterson

Further information
The video for the Presets “Are You The One” 1 Serious Remix can be viewed on line at  www.areyouthe1.com.au or the track can be downloaded for free here

The Presets
The Presets on Myspace
Modular People
Jonathan Zawada

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