Huyndai Santa Fe

Epic Playdate

Launched for the Hyundai Santa Fe's 2013 Super Bowl advertising campaign, Epic Playdate features fives custom-built dioramas, illustrations, pixel art, and original music from the Flaming Lips.

The new 7-passenger Hyundai Santa Fe was launched and targeted toward parents who raise their children as a continuation of their rock n’ roll lifestyle, rather then the end. Innocean’s pre-game Super Bowl ad features our family as they go on a crazy Epic Playdate. Naturally, the Hyundai Santa Fe plays as the family’s co-conspirator as they progressively experience hyper-realistic things, like getting in a chase with a motorcycle gang, playing Space Invaders in the park and rousing some prehistoric beasts at the natural history museum. Our brief: Try to find a way to extend the core concept of that Epic Playdate into an online experience while educating the user about the Santa Fe.

But since we couldn’t film more material to do this as an interactive film, we came back with the concept of creating a whole new epic world out of dioramas and animation. The TV ad communicates the idea of ‘epicness’ really well because the agglomeration of crazy events are strung together so that the whole thing feels really big. Our approach for the interactive was really to do the same, but with craft, so we built five dioramas that loosely mirrored the world that the family explores in the ad (there’s their backyard, the museum, the mountain, the skate park and the beach – each of which relates to a different feature of the car), and those environments are in turn loaded up with games and other interactive pieces that the user can explore. Just as with the ad, different moments have different animation or design styles, so our hope is that the user feels the site is a similarly epic experience.

Understanding the working scale of the dioramas and how many elements we were able to fit in to each one whilst still telling the story was a tricky process. We ended up building each diorama prior to fabrication in 3D, creating full schematics for each piece. This streamlined the fabrication process and allowed us to make sure what we got back was almost identical. From there we created pre-visualizations from the 3d schematics for each diorama, allowing us to go into our shoot day with a clear understanding of what needed to be captured and the story we were telling. This gave us the freedom to focus more on working with our marco lenses and framing, as shooting such small elements was a very delicate process.

Video content was always going to be the core of this expierience. This is great from a content perspective, but can be problematic when device support spans from Flash to mobile — and new edits are rolling in daily. In an effort to curtail the timesuck that comes along with rendering multiple bandwidth graded assets for multiple platforms, we developed a workflow that used Aftereffects jsx scripts, ffmpeg, automated folder actions, and bash scripts that glued it all together. The result was a simple automator action that was triggered when a new edit was added to a folder, and from there it queued a series of resizing and compression. The benefit being the web-ready output was automagically placed into our development environment without having to lift another finger. By doing early tests to find the best compression settings for each device, we were left with a reusable template that can now be repurposed for future projects with minimal modifications.

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