Client: Volvo
Agency: AKQA
Production Company: FutureDeluxe
Awards: D&AD Wood Pencil, Creativepool Silver (Spatial Design) and Bronze (Experiential)
How do you show off a car built for freedom without it ever leaving the stage? For the live launch of Volvo’s all-electric EX60 in Stockholm, we sent the EX60 and the EX60 Cross Country on a road trip through Sweden. They moved through forests, lakes, and coastline across a custom-built 26-metre LED screen, turning on stage in step with every change of scenery. Projections onto the cars helped to marry the light and colour of each landscape across their bodywork, placing them right inside the scene. With the screen running at 11K, guests could pick out individual leaves, rocks, stalks of corn, and birds soaring through the sky, even from the back of the room.
I led production on the FutureDeluxe side, looking after all the screen content and projections, as well as the show’s sound, created by a small separate team of sound designers. The 11K screen presented its own challenges: rendering every frame at native resolution with no upscaling was a big undertaking. We needed to consider every last detail of each frame and be meticulous at every stage, from early look development through to final renders. That time spent crafting the visuals paid off, and the finished landscapes were genuinely beautiful on that scale.
A lot of my time also went into working with the event tech team at Creative Technology to choreograph the three turntables and iron out all the AV details involved in such a mammoth show build. With two different models taking the stage in turn, each with its own shape and proportions, getting every car’s movement to line up with the landscapes was one thing, but it also had to look as good as possible from every seat in the auditorium and for the broadcast cameras capturing the event.