Team One and François Vogel team up for Lexus IS ad campaign

To promote the launch of the new 2006 Lexus IS sport sedan and drive consumer perceptions of Lexus to a new level, the creative team from Team One hired award-winning director François Vogel of Paranoid Projects:Tool to direct a set of visually distinctive spots. The campaign officially kicked-off on Oct. 17, but the first :30 commercial, entitled "Running Rings," began airing in select markets as a campaign teaser earlier this month.

"We set out to make each piece of advertising in this campaign unique," began Jon Pearce, Team One's group creative director and copywriter on the campaign. "We needed to reach an audience of young affluents, so the TV spots needed to behave in a way visually, and with music to communicate everything that's unique about this model. The IS excels not only in luxury, design, comfort and technology, but also in performance. Accordingly, "Why live in one dimension?" is the theme that unites the spots, and each one delivers on that theme in a slightly different way."

The "Running Rings" spot creatively employs the visual effects mastery that has literally made director Vogel's work - and his face - famous worldwide; he directed the award-winning HP Picture Book series of spots and appears in several, pulling still pictures out of the air. For Lexus, to illustrate how everyone has multiple dimensions, "Running Rings" shows numerous versions of a man and a woman in a forest, with each couple interacting in unique ways. When the new IS appears, the original couple climbs in and they pull away. On-screen text then entreats, "The New Lexus IS- Why live in one dimension?"

The campaign's other broadcast spots, entitled "Details" and "Split Screen," also employ unique visual approaches to highlight the combined features of the new IS.

Vogel, who credits his background as a computer artist and his continuing experiments with visual effects as important aspects of his creative process, shared these comments on the campaign's first spot: "I am personally interested when I can be surprised by something that we can't see in our real dimension. 'Running Rings' is the metaphor of the birth of the new Lexus. The idea is that by multiplying, the couple in the forest make the car appear using a kind of magic trick, like the hat of a magician."

Asked about Vogel's contributions, Jon Pearce explained, "He took our ideas and made them better. He did what you hope every director will do: embrace the conceptual reasons behind the spots, but bring his own sensibility to them that takes them beyond what you could have imagined."

Superadgrunts, click on the images to view the spots:

Lexus IS - Running Rings

Lexus IS- Split Screen

Lexus IS- Details

Pearce also commented on the important contributions to the campaign from editor Hal Honigsberg of Chrome, who was on location in Prague during production, as well as those from the teams at visual effects company BUF in Paris and music company Hum in Santa Monica. Along with Pearce, the agency's campaign team also includes executive creative director Chris Graves, group creative director/art director James Dalthorp, and executive producer Jack Epsteen.

The team for Paranoid Projects: Tool included executive producers Phillip Detchmendy and Claude Letessier, head of production Amy DeLossa and line producer Kati Haberstock. Alex Lamarque served as director of photography.

Company 3 Santa Monica's colorist for the project was Stefan
Sonnenfeld.

In addition to Hal Honigsberg, Chrome's project credits include executive producer Deanne Mehling, producer Cristina Matracia and assistant editor Tommy Harden. Honigsberg shared sound design credits with Bob Gremore, who mixed the spot at Juice in Santa Monica, and -- on the "Running Rings" spot -- with the team at music and sound design company X-Tracks in Paris.