After shooting for Audi and Mercedes we recently had the privilege to work with yet another big name in the car industry: Mazda.In order to promote their new flagship models, Mazda teamed up with the creative agency Team Cosmo to launch a Swiss wide push campaign, putting the clients into the limelight and letting the customer satisfaction speak for itself. It is often the case for big, well established brands, that when launching a new product, the sternest and most honest reactions come out of their own ranks. As the saying goes: The customer is king. Or to put it in other terms: The people that are already invested in your brand, know best about the product and what can be done in order to improve it. It is due to this reasoning, that Mazda conducted a survey, letting their Swiss customers review their own cars and gathering honest opinions on Mazda’s products. As the results were predominantly very positive, this concept was then later taken up in the autumn campaign led by Team Cosmo using the tagline: “The hardest Jury in the world. Our costumers.“ In a nutshell, the idea was to produce short, 15 second clips, showcasing real Mazda customers rating their cars on a scale from one to five stars. Real People, real opinions.

To further enhance the believability and in order to stay as close to real life as possible, the clips were set to be shot in single one takes, without fancy cutting between different camera angles, only with a slight pushing-in on the talents, in order to add some dynamic camera movement. A very simple concept in theory, but one that has its pitfalls nonetheless. We are working with real everyday people, not trained actors. People that are not used to having a crew of ten people standing around them, while a huge camera is raging towards their faces.

Thus it’s perfectly understandable that we had to often repeat the procedure for several takes until we finally got that one shot without a blooper or without the talent accidentally looking back and forth between the director and the camera.Also, as the shooting took place outside and nearby a road, there were countless times a motorbike or car engine found its way into the sound recording, leaving us with an unusable take. However, we always got the shot in the end. Cut! Next talent, move the car, move the dolly tracks, move the diffusors and reflectors and… Action! After a fully packed day with ten different set-ups and temperatures above 30 degrees, we finally got the last shot. We packed up, ready to go home and rest for a day, as on Monday, we would already have to be on our next shoot in Austria for yet another car brand! Yeehaa!

Thank you Mazda and Remy Fabrikant and his team for the amazing opportunity and thank you of course to our awesome crew for your hard work and dedication! See you soon, on set!

BEHIND THE SCENES

If you would like to get some more insights into how OTAKUS works its magic, check out the behind the scenes film!