Celica – Looks Fast

We were tasked with a relaunch campaign for the newly updated Celica. Updated was the keyword. Nothing had really changed except for some exterior moldings that made it look sportier than its previous iteration. The lack of many things to talk about turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

My partner and I were juniors, one car launch campaign into our careers. There was little oversight as a Camry launch was eating up every brain cell in the agency except ours. 
My partner, an actor by training, put the words in the old man's mouth. Then we thought of the dog idea, but we couldn’t see it in one shot, which was a problem until we scouted the location. All of a sudden it was obvious where the dog needed to come from and what it needed to do. It did it exactly once in a long, long series of takes. 

We laughed out loud in the edit. We didn’t anticipate gold in Cannes, nor the standing ovation in the theater when it played there. The reception back at Saatchi for the first Gold Lion was enough to trigger a serious case of imposter syndrome.