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VW SORRY COMMERCIAL

xingyu zhong
May 3, 2018
4 min read

This is the last project of Brand Design 4 class. We were making a video ad for Volkswagen to say sorry for the emission scandal. The relation between VW and their customers affected by this scandal looked a lot like a breaking up couple when I was thinking about the idea of the video. So, I came up with a story of a breaking up couple coming back together, which represents VW has made things right to get their customer back. The metaphor here is that the boy is Volkswagen company, the girl is their customer.

The class felt this idea is interesting and funny. So it got picked. And we had 3 members to create this video together.

When we really started shooting, it was really hard to make the picture as a confussion first to make audience to think there was a boyfriend but at last there wasn't, it was just a car. The hardest part here was how to make the same picture have two different explanation, and it needed to make sense when people look back the whole story. We kinda spent a lot of time to disscuss that.

I think it would actually be easier for us to make a anime of this story. But when I was concieving the idea, I visioned it as a real person acting video. Somehow, I feel like it would best represent the story. And our memebers kinda felt the same way. So we started the challenge of shooting a video. I am so grateful that we have Jenny in our team to be the actress in our video. Even though it was hard to act those little emotions out, she really did a great job of acting and presenting the story. And it was a relief having Deanna to deal with the camera and software, and teach me how to edit the video. I think it was hard to create a video like that when we kinda have zero experience, but we did learn a lot while solving all the problems came up in the process.

And here comes the most challenging part for me, editing the video. Since I came up with the idea, memebers thought me as the director of this video. My job was mainly puting all the clips together to make the storyline completed. When we took the first version of this video, it was about 2 minutes even after cutting out a lot of scenes. The requirement was 30 seconds. That was way too short time for the original story, so I had to rewrite the story to make it shorter. Even after shorten the story, it was still not enough time. So, it was so challenging for me to cut every clip as short as possible and delete some of them, but also make the whole storyline completed, especially this was the first time I used Premiere. The actual work didn't just exact to seconds, but 1/30 second. I never knew this little time would make so much difference before this 30 seconds commercial.

The last part of the video was to add music in it. Because we had two different vibe part in it, we needed two different music to show the change of the girls emotion. It was hard to find the songs too. Jenny did a great job finding those music and put them in the video. The first song was LANY's Super Far, we used the lyric "Wanna stay. Can you give me a reason? I don't think so, I don't think so" in the part where they "broke up", which was perfect for that scene; The next song was a 80s song The Cars' Drive, singing " Who's gonna drive you home tonight?" showing the girl was changing her mind.

But I felt the last part could also use an exciting song to match the girl's emotion there when she got a new Volkswagen car and therefore forgave Volkswagen and choose to stay with it. So, I also did a version with the song "Let it Go" in the last part singing "Turn my back and slam the door. And here I stand and here I'll stay. Let it go, let it go. The cold never bothered me anyway". I felt like that matched the scene when the girl went out of the door and ran to the car, decided to "let it go" and forgive VW. Also the last part was funny to have a pun that VW said "We knew you would come around" when the car drived around the circle, and with the song singing "the cold never bothered me anyway". It just sounded like VW was so confident that their customer would come back that the coldness of their customers toward them didn't bother them at all. Well, maybe not really showing a guilty attitude that usually should be in an apology, but it was what Volkswagen actually did. I think it is funny and also showing Volkswagen's ability to make things right for their customers so that they are so confident their customers would come back even after the mistake happened.

Here are the videos:

With song "Drive":