The new BMW X4 shall continue the success story of the BMW X-models.
Sales of Sports Activity Coupés (SAC) are booming and BMW customers accept waiting times of up to one year to obtain their dream car. BMW's
SACs play an exceptional role in the market: They are founders of their segment and thus, pioneers in the automotive industry. The TVC has to be made accessible to all markets. Hence, the challenge lies in the development of a modular concept from which markets can extract and create their individual cuts and motifs.
With each X Model, BMW has a established a new, innovative segment in the industry, making every model a pioneer of its time. Our target group is driven by pioneering spirit. In the past, the pioneer was the discoverer, the explorer of unmapped countries, the inventor of new devices. Today’s pioneers go beyond discovering new worlds. They are open-minded, unconventional
and think outside the box. They question approved values and challenge the status quo. Their mindset is all about the big unknown and thus all about the X. They are truly X-Minded. The TVC takes us into the powerful world of one of those X-Minds.
Creative Execution
The film is part of BMW’s X Range campaign “Embrace The Unknown” and it’s all about embracing possibilities, ideas and territories no one explored before. We were assigned with developing an unidentifiable global city that heaved and rolled on a landscape that reflected the movement of ocean waves. To ensure diversity, we used street layouts and cityscapes from San Francisco, Tokyo and Sao Paolo. Besides the creation of the waves we also completed many additions to the shot plates, including weather extensions, cleanup and matte paintings.
To achieve the desired effect we employed a mix of techniques that combined re-projected helicopter photography, street-level photography and full CGI. At all times it was crucial that the effect would look neither destructive, nor un-realistic.
The biggest of challenges was the opening waterfall shot (Iguazu Falls, Argentina/Brazil), since no helicopter flights were allowed over the Argentine side of the falls. The solution came by sourcing some existing helicopter material that was shot directly over the river. From that we developed a technique to rebuild the vista from the direction that we wanted.
In this way, we built up multiple elements from different shots and created a new terrain viewable from a new camera angle. Then we started building elements together from the San Mateo Bridge that stretched across the bay in San Francisco.
All in all completing the VFX for this film was an epic ride in itself.