Los Angeles-based Boxer Films director/editor Robert Groenwold evokes a wild fairytale landscape, fraught with danger, in the new :60 “Rare Beast: Origin” for Volkswagen of America out of AKQA, Washington, DC. The cinematic, animal-filled film, launched on smart phones, introduces the all-new 2011 Touareg Supercharged Hybrid to the U.S. market, christening it a ‘rare beast.’ The spot recently launched online as part of an interactive campaign that enables users to virtually experience the vehicle.
Set to a poem recited in voiceover, the film opens with atmospheric nighttime exteriors of a mist-shrouded forest and an ominous-looking moon as the low howl of a foreboding wind whistles through the trees. Overhead lamps swing ominously and a penned-in flock of sheep fidgets anxiously as the headlights of an unseen vehicle cut through the fog, signaling the arrival of an unknown predator. A woman’s voiceover accompanies the mysterious imagery, reciting a poem that portends, “Howling winds ‘round midnight streaming, remnants of some nightmare fleeting.”
Close-ups reveal suggestive glimpses of the powerful vehicle’s design, including the front-end, whose headlights seem to glower like a prowling animal as the recitation continues, “Hunger, fed by time and test/Power born that cannot rest.”
The 2011 Touareg Supercharged Hybrid comes to rest at a misty solitary crossroads, where a blinking traffic signals flashes a menacing red. We now see the vehicle revealed in full, with the verse declaiming, “Shrouded by its glass and steel, a rare beast – half dream, half real.”
The vehicle now bursts into motion ferociously, accelerating through the woods and handling the road with animalistic grace. Finally, its path takes it into a remote residential area, where it backs into a garage tamely to conclude its nocturnal run. The verse concludes, “For a chosen few, it has appeared. A heartbeat felt, a face revealed,” followed by the super, “The Word’s First Supercharged Hybrid. The 2011 Touareg.” The Volkswagen of America logo and tag, “That’s Das Auto,” close out the spot.
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Credits:
Client: Volkswagen of America
Title: “Rare Beast Origin” :60
Airdate: Online 3/10/11
Agency: AKQA, Washington, DC
Creative Director: Ginny Golden
Associate Creative Director: Jefferson Liu
Associate Creative Director: Nick Strada
Art Director: John Whitlock
Creative Strategist: Christine Sheehan
Agency Producer: Scott Little
Account Director: Laura Breines
Account Director: Katie Fouts
Account Executive: Erin Chandler
Production Company: Boxer Films, LA
Director: Robert Groenwold
D.P.: Tim Hudson
EPs: Beth George, John Clark
Editor: Robert Groenwold
Producer: John Quinn