The Ontario Toyota Dealers Association
Award winning website design with a unique focus on navigation and user journey that set the standard.
Strategy, Creative Direction, UX, Design, Production
The Ontario Toyota Dealers Association wanted more engaging content on their website than just pictures. It was 2008 and the Internet was just starting to get “bigger pipes”, so video was no longer out off the table. I proposed a series of video walk-arounds for each product Toyota offered, which in turn created on of the most interesting logistical nightmares wrangling some 16 vehicles to set with a union crew and shooting interiors and exteriors in a week. This was followed by a lengthy period of long days in a video editing bay, going over each piece of footage, rendering it down to usable sizes and then converting it to a format for online use.
Did I mention it was ridiculously expensive too?
THE ASK
So the following year roles around and Toyota had produced brand new models of a few of its flagship vehicles, but there was no budget left for spending another few weeks on set/in editing. A solution needed to happen or the existing content would need to be pulled down.
I engaged a 3D team regarding the possibility of working on this project for substantially less cost, and was happy to find out relatively inexpensive models of these vehicles already existed online. They could purchase them and then clean up and enhance the missing portions to make them proper Toyota vehicles. The original shoot required about 25 people all in, plus the vehicles, insurance, client and staff craft services, the Thomson Viper FilmStream Camera (because we needed this digital, even though that move was an overkill and change). The list goes on and on.
For the interiors, we were going to head to any dealership that had the vehicle and shoot them static. We would overlay the navigation elements within the video itself, and be able to have far more control over the attitude each vehicle would display. We could simulate weather or terrain on the exterior, adjust camera lenses and angles… things not dreamt possible with the traditional shoot.
Plus, I dug being able to go back to client and offer a solution for a quarter of a sixteenth of a fraction of a speck from a crumb of the cost of the original… and it was going to look waaaay better.
