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I finished off the thanksgiving leftovers for lunch today and it got me thinking about other kinds of leftovers. Like for these posts. I have index cards and sticky notes and notebook pages full of half-fledged ideas that I’m never going to do anything with so what do I do with those? I could congregate them into a final post of word vomit but I don’t feel like that’s very useful. I want to go out with a BANG not with a barf. So instead I’ll focus on leftovers when it comes to VW. Creature Feature! (Yeah, no clue why that’s where my mind went with that.)

Deep in the icy heart of Germany, there once was a being. A mishmash made entirely of cast off parts of old cars, the creature lurked in junkyards and back lots, abandoned parks and empty warehouses. It lived a lonely, solitary life, afraid of what the world would think if anyone ever saw its ugly face. “Lemon!” the neighborhood kids would yell at it. They always said that. And they threw sticks and rocks. The creature avoided the children, hid from them. It watched the other cars sometimes, through fences and windows. The creature wished to be like those cars, shiny and beautiful, but it was ugly and rusty instead. But one day an angel appeared, or at least what the creature thought was an angel. Surely no car it had ever seen before had been so beautiful. The angel car was not afraid of it, but approached it and then guided it out of the warehouse. The creature followed willingly. It would have followed that car anyway. It did not speak, but the creature saw a circle with upside down triangles in it on the car’s hood. The creature wondered about that. It thought about how similar that little circle was to the rusty broken one on its own hood. Eventually the angel car stopped at a large service station and invited the creature to go in. As soon as it entered the darkened garage, everything went black. The next thing it knew the creature was back outside of the service station. But something was different. the creature was a creature no longer but an antique, fully functional, and downright elegant car. That’s the beauty of lasting quality engines, and fully interchangeable parts.

Enduring value, but that’s about it. Weirdness. Kinda fun though.

Singing.

Well, I’m not actually going to sing, but I will come up with my very own song about VW.

Chorus:
V-Double-U is great it’s true,
But you already knew that didn’t you?
Because we’ve been around
The block a few hundred times.
And we know how to write
A song that rhymes.

Yeah V-Double-U is great it’s true,
But you already knew that didn’t you?
Not your grandad’s car,
but just as good.
You know you love
What’s under the hood.

V-Double-U is great it’s true,
But you already knew that didn’t you?
We’re always nice,
No smoother ride.
We’re cheap on gas,
And fun to drive.
And we’ve got your back,
All five hundred miles.
No need to walk
The whole way home,
Cause we know she’ll let you
Walk her down any aisles
Just show up with us,
you’re always welcome.

Yeah V-Double-U is great it’s true,
But you already knew that didn’t you?
You already knew that didn’t youuu?

Yeah, well, it’s kinda dumb.
I snuck in a reference to the Proclaimers’ “I would walk 500 miles” too.
Brand relevance: definitely covers enduring value with the whole dependable reputation and long-standing business thing. Innovative design: “not your grandad’s car.” Motoring pleasure: cheesy but present and accounted for.

Why is it that everyone assumes the future will be all chrome spires, space elevators, and hovercars? I happen to hope that in the future we’ll care more about the planet than getting from place to place faster. I want pedal power. Imagine what a car commercial would be like if every car was zero emissions. The advertising goals would have to be totally different. It would be about the experience instead of the speed or efficiency, the emotion instead of the motion. Now I’m not talking derpy little Flintstone’s cars here, just because the technology is basic doesn’t mean it can’t be elegantly designed. Picture this: All VW cars are self-propelled in that you yourself propel the car, and to make it actually reasonable, everything uses magnetic repulsion to hover so that you only have to exert energy to move forward, you aren’t fighting friction. An advanced yet basic mechanism converts your mechanical energy into kinetic energy. Cars can look how ever you like them because aerodynamics don’t matter, you don’t need to get anywhere that fast. Your car could be a bubble or a bullet or a pyramid or anything in between, it’s up to you. Infinitely customizable option still make sense because each car is 3D printed on demand, no wasted materials, instant supply and demand. So how would VW advertise in this cleaner, better future? Something fun and silly and totally absurd: bubbles. Nanomolecular particles mixed with soap could make bubbles in any shape imaginable, mimicking existing cars and any other forms and modeling the possibilities for your custom car.

“The future is bright, but we’ll be sure not to leave the lights on.” “The only thing full of hot air is our patented bubble mods.” etc, etc.

This was weird and totally outlandish but whatever. It’s an idea. An alien of an idea but an idea nonetheless. Does it represent the brand? Everyday motoring pleasure? Check. Enduring value? Sure, let’s say these cars last right up until you push the auto-biodegrade button which denatures all the protein structures holding it together and it turns into carbon and other excellent and fully recyclable materials. Innovative design? You bet. Don’t tell me that infinitely customizable cars isn’t innovative.

So I went to the park a while back.
It used to be Geometry Park but now it’s called “Paradise Park” which is strangely suiting when you actually think about it. First off, it’s tucked down an alleyway, nearly impossible to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, so it sort of is a hidden paradise, a secluded little haven. And then there’s the park itself. It isn’t really a ‘park’ in that there are no trees or playground equipment, nothing really except for some odd geometric shapes with strangely childlike artwork painted on them. Aside from the murals, the shapes look rather like very large building blocks just sort of strewn about and piled together haphazardly.

The most painfully poetic thing about it though is the graffiti which I probably wouldn’t have even noticed really if there hadn’t been parks and rec employees there when I went, talking about how best to go about covering or removing it. When they left, I had a look for myself and sure enough this bizarre hidden and childlike ‘paradise’ had been contaminated by spray painted tags, racial slurs, and crude drawings. It was profoundly saddening that such a strange and beautiful place was ruined without a second thought by careless and/or angry individuals ‘rebelling against the man’.

And really, that’s how most innocent things get ruined, misguided anger and abuse.

This has nothing to do with Volkswagen, Elizabeth. Yeah, I know, I’m getting there. So most people know the basic story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, right? It was paradise made specifically for them but they disobeyed the one rule and got banished from it forever. Well I was thinking about that, and about paradise park, and perfection in general, how it’s unattainable now, and I was like, “well what’s as close to perfect as you can get?” VW. (Okay, we all know not really, but just go with it.)

So play that up. Have a VW car right outside of a breathtakingly gorgeous fenced-in garden (garden of eden reference) and have this line or something similar: “as close to paradise as you can get.”

That’s it. That’s all I got. And I can’t photoshop to save my life so that’s all you get too.

I keep going back to traffic so I’m going to do a post about it.

So there’s a back up on the interstate, cars are just crawling along. Everyone is tired, annoyed, or apathetic as they sit in traffic. There’s a fake billboard advertisement with an overly cheerful kid in lederhosen eating ice cream. Eyes roll. Watches tick. Some horns honk sporadically. Suddenly the billboard changes. (And becomes..what? A scoreboard? A karaoke scroller? A game of pinball?)

What kinds of things could even be used to play games in traffic?

• headlights
• horns
• radios
• car doors

(hmm, how about using all of those to make music?)

So combine that stuff. The watch ticking. A turn signal, the seatbelt chime, car doors slamming, seat belts clicking, headlights flashing, all of them can be part of a song. Okay, so back to the drawing board:

Back up on the interstate, cars are crawling along. Everyone is tired, annoyed, or apathetic as they sit in traffic. Eyes roll. Watches tick. Some horns honk sporadically. One guy in a VW lets out an explosive sigh and jerks forward out of his slump to turn on the radio. He fiddles with it, flipping through a bunch of stations before landing on the first few notes of a song, the perfect song. He starts tapping. On the steering wheel, the dashboard, he messes with his windows, and as he does, the people in cars nearby catch on. His enthusiasm is contagious. So they pick up the beat too. More and more people wake up out of their haze and get into it. Before the song is over there’s a whole host of foot-tapping, light-flashing people in on the impromptu jam session.

“VW. Find your fun. Anywhere.”

Better. Much better.

 

Bit of chalk street art here, and while I can definitely say I had fun doing this one, even though it was quite cold outside and I got a number of funny looks in the process, I realize now that I really should have planned it out a little better (or at all) when I started because this is confusing. the concept has a sense of whimsy to it that I like. The trail of ‘breadcrumbs’ begs you to follow it, the only problem with this incarnation is that it doesn’t actually lead anywhere. If this was to be a proper brand experience, I would do one of two things: either tie it into the murals project (Follow the path to find the different murals!) or have the path lead to a VW dealership or something. I personally like the tie-in much better, and I like that I’m sort of continually building upon earlier ad ideas, ‘growing’ the brand by ‘growing’ these into full blown ad campaigns.

I’ve been thinking about processes and I might actually have to do another mind map about this because while we’ve been focusing a lot on the creative process, exploring other sorts of processes is worth doing too. There’s biological processes like reflexes, chemical processes like combustion, the grief process, puberty, life cycles, the water cycle; all processes. That’s a lot to cover in one post though so I think I’ll pick just one to focus on this time. I like biological processes, bio is actually something of a hobby of mine, and I thought it might be cool to have a commercial that nerds out about the process that powers cars the way that I nerd out about how neuronal impulses work. Why not explain that to your everyday driver? Internal combustion isn’t some complex mechanical wizardry that has to be a mystery to everyone except engineers. Maybe it’s just me, but having a commercial that teaches me something I didn’t know appeals to my intellect and definitely gets my attention. It would also be neat as a nod to the ad campaign explaining VW cars’ lack of radiator problems because they don’t have radiators, they’re air-cooled.

So how does a combustion engine work? To put it simply: repeated compression and explosion. Seriously. It’s elegantly violent. (Hm, what if the explanation/description was done in a really elegantly sexy way?) Basically, there’s a chamber where gas is pumped in then compressed by pistons, then lit by spark plugs so that it explodes and throws the piston back to the initial position in a great burst of heat and other forms of energy. This occurs rapidly over and over again in a combustion engine so maybe focusing on just ignition would be better? I’m not actually as clear on how exactly the process starts. Wait, what if I just did it the same way I’m writing this post now?

“Internal combustion isn’t some complex mechanical wizardry that has to be a mystery to everyone except engineers. It’s fairly simple actually, just repeated compression and explosion inside an engine. It’s elegantly violent. There’s a chamber where gas and air is pumped in, then compressed by pistons, then lit by spark plugs. From there, the mixture explodes and throws the piston back to the initial position which turns a crankshaft and makes the wheels turn. Pretty cool, huh?”

This narration could be accompanied by a number of different things. Maybe the narrator is someone famous doing a mock story-time while driving a really nice new volkswagen. I like that. The clips could be of everything besides the actual process the narrator is talking about and instead be things like the car making turns, or braking, or whatever. But it would start with the narrator in the driver’s seat, starting the car and looking at the camera on the passenger’s side.

I REALLY don’t like not knowing what I’m doing or where I’m going with a post but I think I need to step away from that need for control and let these ideas grow on their own, without me forcing them back into a shape that I prefer. Anyway, this ad plays with the innovation side of things because as much as car companies like to pretend they’re innovative, the internal combustion engine really hasn’t changed much since it was invented. This idea kind of pulls away that screen of pretense and makes VW seem down to earth and approachable. Decent concept, even if I didn’t plan it.

The best ideas have the potential for being the biggest failures.

I heard that this semester and it’s still painfully true. I’ve had my fair share of suckish ideas in this class. And I’ve also had a few diamonds in the rough that made me want to throw my hands up and say, “That’s it! I’m done. That’s the best I’ll ever do.” But I either way, I had to do the same thing: just keep going. And the thing is, that’s how it works. The only way to get better at having better ideas is to have a LOT of crap ones first. It’s the only way. So let’s talk about the worst commercial ever.

There are infinite possibilities for bad commercials and very few for good ones. It’s easy to suck. That’s like real-life lesson 101. Not sucking is hard. Before you stop sucking you have to go through a lot of suckishness.

So what if there was a VW commercial that was about commercials that weren’t very good? A montage. It’s a great way to play up all the ways that VW is the opposite of that. It’s simple but it has a lot of potential. I like it. It’s bass-akwards and just offbeat enough that it’s perfect for VW.
By showcasing the sort comings of others, it displays the value and skill VW possesses.

I want to do things I like. I want to make things I can be proud of.
But I feel like for every decent idea I have, there are twelve more that are ‘eh’.
I have to keep telling myself, “this doesn’t suck just because it isn’t your favorite.” But that doesn’t stop me from wanting ideas that surprise and impress me.

I had this one as I was writing the post about working out. I got to thinking about things that family passes down from one generation to the next. Now I don’t mean genetics, we aren’t talking about Jimmy having uncle Bobby’s nose here, or whatever; I mean taste. Because whether you know it or not, your upbringing had a huge impact on your tastes as they developed. My dad loved sharp cheddar and spicy salsa and to this day, I am a huge fan of extra hot indian food and flavorful cheeses. Maybe your family passed down a love of chocolate or a hatred of mayonnaise, I don’t know, but it got me thinking about brand loyalty because my dad only likes Jif peanut butter. I seriously don’t care that much but that was his favorite, and now it’s my little brother’s favorite too. Your family can pass down a love for anything, not just peanut butter. Cars, for example. (See what I did there? Great transition.) If a family member gets a VW and loves it, you become more likely to think of that brand when it comes to buying a car yourself.

So my idea is a family reunion. A big holiday gathering of aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, and everything in between all in one place. Everything is decked out for Christmas, with beautiful decorations and music playing but it’s total chaos with kids running around playing, laughter and everyone talking at once, and of course lots of catching up to do. We see a young couple holding hands as the guy tells the story of how they met to a captive audience. The tale is followed by guffaws and a jolly comment about “you know where you got that good taste” accompanied by a knowing wink at the “little lady.” Outside we see almost a dozen cars, a congregation of Volkswagens. Late arrivals show up bearing casseroles and people come out to help with bags. Someone laughs as they get out of a car holding a dish of food, “the family’s all here, huh?” Zoom out to a view of the cars and the house. We see the sun set and the lights on the house flicker on. (This is when you’d insert “Das Auto” and the VW logo, probably along with a short phrase about family or something, which I really can’t think of right now.)

I really like the concept here and I just thought of this, but it could also be good to include a different family, maybe in a city or something versus a suburb or where ever this one is located, play up the accessibility of the brand. This one is chock full o’ holiday spirit but I’m not sure I’m proud of it. Like I said, the concept is great, just not the execution.

What excites me? What am I passionate about? I don’t really “fangirl” over many ‘normal’ things like celebrities, musical artists, or TV shows, but there are some things in this world I just love and could talk about forever. I think looking at the things I can’t get enough of can tell me a lot about myself as a person and as an artist.

• My favorite author. I love every Scott Westerfeld book I’ve ever read and I tell anyone who asks all about him. He is a YA fiction writer but that doesn’t mean he only writes angsty supernatural love stories. One of the reasons he is my favorite author is that he doesn’t just stick with one genre. He’s written galactic space opera sci-fi, alternate-reality historical fiction, dystopian futurism, the list goes on. I love that he’s all over the place because so am I, and changing things up keeps them interesting. He doesn’t let a need for continuity keep him from trying new things. I most definitely aspire to be the same way.
• My city. So yeah, I’m in love with Richmond. I love everything about the city. I love how VCU is such an integral part of it that you can’t always tell where the school stops and Richmond starts. I love the chaos. There’s always 5001 things going on and never a shortage of fun and interesting things to do. I love the diversity. Richmond culture holds a renaissance value for individuality that creates and encourages such a wide range of unique and interesting people. I love the street art, the hidden alleys, the incongruous wildlife, the parks, the river, the trains, the food variety, the cool modern architecture mixed in with the beautiful old buildings, the graceful bridges, the festivals, all of it. I live and breathe Richmond and I love feeling like I am actually part of this amazing city.
• Learning. That sounds so strange and it actually sort of is for me. I love talking to new people who have a different perspective and different experiences than me, but at the same time, I’m an awkward little introvert who is afraid to talk to strangers. I seek and gather knowledge like a squirrel hoards acorns. I have interests ranging from cellular biology to art history to wordsmithing and the quest to know more is invigorating until it’s required.
• Art. I like poetry, books, music, museums, all kinds of art and expression. I revel in creativity because it fuels my own.

So that’s a nice fun list about myself but how do I relate that to the brand? Am I supposed to make myself get excited about VW? I don’t really have an interest in cars in general, not to mention brands. Maybe I should find someone else who really likes the brand. Or do something that excites me and is also somehow related… The last one really makes the most sense so I’ll go with that.

I’m going to design a mural because I love street art a lot and an ad in the form of something that is both permanent and beautiful is really appealing.

I can’t really explain why it’s Easter Eggs, it just sort of happened that way. When I tried to draw the first logo, it came out ovally so I just went with it. I used oil pastels so that’s a little strange (the whole thing is a little strange if I’m being totally honest). Maybe you can’t even tell what it’s supposed to be. I don’t even know, man. I ended up making the second on the facing page playing with the idea of “what’s in the eggs? Why are they in the air?” Because that’s how VW Beetles are born. 🙂
Looking at both together, I think they would make a good series/pair in two different locations. They have slightly different styles, which I happen to like, but are connected in an obvious way. The play on the Beetles as actual bugs has been done before but as an ad-art-mural? Probably not. Either way, it’s weird, it’s silly, it’s a decent idea, and I had fun doing it.