Auris impressions

A while ago I shot some impressions of the Toyota Auris, together with Marc Cornelissen, who has been featured on this blog before. The Auris is a new hybrid model that Toyota is introducing right now, combining a traditional car engine with an electric engine, which makes it extremely fuel efficient.

We decided to film at the "Maasvlakte", an artificial extension of the Rotterdam harbour. Here you'll find traditional heavy industry and coal-burning power plants right next to windmills, representing a move towards renewable energy sources. We thought it would be a nice metaphor for the gap that the Auris is trying to brigde.

Hope you enjoy the end result. The spoken parts are actually in Dutch, but if you don't speak Dutch, hopefully the images speak for themselves.

I used a (rented) 300mm f/2.8 lens to make background objects like ships and windmill look huge in relation to the car. Worked great, except maybe for the fact that this lens is rather large, and therefore relatively easily affected by gusts of wind, which are a permanent factor in this location.

Color correction was done in Final Cut Pro and Magic Bullet Looks. For the industrial images I developed a slightly desaturated, grainy look, to make them look more ominous.

Below are some behind the scenes production stills. These were actually taken during the filming of the very last shot, in the center of Rotterdam. Click for larger versions.