After a roll of wonderful films called the People’s Car Project for VW in China – see Related Content where you can also view their earlier paper engineering commercial for Skoda Europe which we rather liked too – weareflink have launched a campaign for BMW China working once again with CONTRA Productions China. We catch up with Andreas Lampe, joint-partner with Niko Tziopanos, of weareflink about their work for China.

Please tell us about the brief for BMW, The Incident.

The client, BMW China, and agency, Interone Beijing, really wanted this campaign to be a short action film. The main film was intended for and premiered at the launch event of the new updated XM models at a racetrack in Shanghai. Two teaser films were launched on a webpage weeks prior to the event.

And the production?

weareflink developed the style-frames and shooting-boards. All live action was shot in three days on location in Germany.

We used the interior (cockpit and cargo area) of a military cargo plane. Finding such a plane, with a functioning cockpit and hatchway proved to be quite difficult as most planes are either in use or in museums and not functioning.
We shot one day in the plane and over the next two days shot the driving sequences both on runways and off-road on a field. It was three straight cold nights at the beginning of April.

A huge challenge was the schedule we only had four weeks after the editing to complete the film. We had around 100 plus VFX shots. Out of this there were 30 full cg shots and everything else involved a combination of live action and cg elements or extension.

The exterior of the plane and all aerial shots were CG. We had to create a nose-art for the plane that would go along with the special M-force unit.

Super brief low-down on weareflink and how you started in China:

We started weareflink in March 09 at the height of the finanical crisis. After a few weeks we were invited to a pitch through a Chinese ad agency MMIA for CCTV Broadcast station.
They had seen Niko’s earlier work for Konzerthaus Dortmund and searched for him. It was supposed to be for an Image trailer for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic. We were up against local people and we did a presentation with style-frames and the whole shebang. Apparently they felt we were most considerate of their culture and needs and we were awarded the job. We created CCTV Ink and won plenty awards around the planet. In China it is extremely well known.

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