Tyres for blood? Are they mad?

In the case of Engine Design, probably! These guys came up with tyre sperm, tyre hearts and tyre vertebrae - all part of a major ad campaign for Toyo Tyres.

Northampton-based creative agency Engine won and created an entire ad campaign for leading tire manufacturer Toyo Tyres, featuring vital body parts made of tyres. The campaign caused such a stir in the industry that the key publications printing the adverts upgraded them to prime positions at no extra cost. Toyo swiftly increased UK market share and even managed to raise prices to within 5% of the premium brands.

The team at Engine brainstormed the brief and created a range of concepts to raise awareness of the Toyo brand in the UK. Creative Director Matt Key explains:

"We wanted to create a campaign which gave the brand added personality and made it look aspiring to discerning drivers, track day drivers and keen motorists. We eventually settled on the "Body" campaign, as this would communicate how Toyo Tyres are as integral to cars as vital body parts are to the body in delivering high performance."

"Tires are of course not found in the human body so we needed a way of creating natural-looking images that illustrated what we were trying to convey. As we're an ideas-led agency, sometimes our imagination can really come up with the most insane ideas, and traditional methods can't visualize what we want because the idea doesn't exist outside of our heads. 3D lifts any such restrictions in the creative process."

"In a 3D app such as CINEMA 4D you can realize any idea and visualize it for the client to the highest standard. CINEMA 4D was the perfect tool to render the concepts we had for the 'Body' campaign."

Being a successful global company, Toyo was spoiled for choice when it came to agencies pitching for the campaign. Matt continues:

"We put in weeks of preparation to win the Toyo account. Pitching is an area we've always been strong in as it gives us the opportunity to show clients what we can offer, to transcend the perception that going with a 'bigger' agency is the safest route to take."

"For the Toyo campaign, the images were all created within CINEMA 4D. That's our 3D app of choice. We like CINEMA 4D because it works well on Mac's, not just PC's. It's competitively priced and it has always been a reliable and robust piece of software. CINEMA 4D has never crashed on us and still delivers a professional 3D solution. The modular format also allows us to expand the toolset as the need arises, which is also key to our ability to offer the best service to our clients."

"Once we had the images created, we used the Multi-Pass rendering in CINEMA 4D to save out PSD files which we could load directly into Photoshop."

"Multi-Pass is very cool. It renders the image at the same speed as an ordinary render, but enables you to pick aspects of an image that you'd like on separate layers. This can be anything from lights, to objects, materials, material channels and shadows. It's awesome for doing final tweaking and compositing in Photoshop."

"Once in Photoshop, we used the layer info to make color and shadow tweaks and add the finishing touches to the adverts."

Formed in 1997, Engine is an independent agency that has built up an enviable reputation for creating high-impact design, complex digital media solutions and quality video production for a range of clients that include BBC, Elior UK, EMAP, Haymarket, Mercedes Benz HPE, Ministry of Sound, PACE and Universal Music TV. Following on from the successful run with the ad campaign, Engine are now Toyo's lead agency in the UK. Engine are currently working on a number of projects including a range of illustrations for various magazines, a 3D motion graphics project for PACE, as well as developing further campaigns for Toyo.

For more info on Engine, visit www.engine-design.co.uk

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