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Volkswagen is painting a pretty picture to promote the fall launch of its new 2012 Jetta GL model and, believe it or not, the car itself is the brush.

The campaign, developed by Red Urban in Toronto, is centred on a 30-second TV commercial that shows the Jetta GL highlighting its performance capabilities by creating a light painting, using its headlights and tail lamp, as it races around a darkness-shrouded parking lot. The effort features the tagline “Driving can be beautiful.”
“The new Jetta GLI not just a faster, sportier Jetta, it’s also an innovative car, so it only made sense to hold the advertising to the same standards,” says Christina Yu, ECD, Red Urban Canada. “Light streaks are so much a part of car photography that we wondered if we could use slow shutter photography and the New Jetta GLI to create ‘performance art.’ Not only did we capture the Jetta’s performance, we also captured the light streaks on camera with no CGI trickery. It required a bit of innovative thinking on our part, but for a car like this, it just didn’t make sense to fake it.”

The spot was created in collaboration with Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker Hubert Davis who, with the help of his DoP Adam Marsden, developed a new filmmaking technique in order to capture both the vehicle’s high-speed manoeuvring and long-exposure pics of the subsequent light trails from the exact same angle. It concludes with a shot from 150 feet above the parking lot that reveals the finished product: a light painting of the VW logo.

“Driving can be beautiful” will also include OOH ads that use  actual long exposure photos taken during the shoot. A “making of” documentary shot by Davis is also part of the mix.

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Credits:

advertiser: Volkswagen Canada
agency: Red Urban Canada
CD: Christina Yu
AD: Joel Pylypiw
copywriter: Dave Barber
agency producers: David Isaac, Andrea Hull
account supervisoer: Sonia Ruckemann
sound and music: Eggplant
music producer: Adam Damelin
prodco: Untitled Films
director: Hubert Davis
executive producer: Lexy Kavluk
line producer: Tuula Hopp
DoP: Adam Marsden
editing house: Rooster Post
editor: Dave De Carlo
post production house: The Vanity
compositor: Naveen Srivastava