Thursday, February 14, 2008

'64 Chevrolet Impala Magazine Ad

HOW CHEVROLET MAKES ROADS FEEL SMOOTH AS THE MAPS THEY'RE PRINTED ON. This is an interesting experiment in trying to make photography do something similar to many of the Chevrolet newspaper ads where the car climbs a very steep hill or is shown with the road going off behind it in a dramatic part of America. If you cruse through the blog you will see a few ads where this was done very successfully with art. The thing that makes it work in both art and photography is a combination of two different perspectives in the same picture. This is not possible in real life but can create a dramatic road to show off Chevy performance in our ads. My boss, Jim Hastings figured out how to do this with art before I came on the scene. I thought it could be done with photography too and he let me take a photographer and go to the west coast to try. We shot the car and the road it is on in one location that offered a curve in the distance--that's one perspective. Then we went to a location where we could get a dramatic look at the ocean and rocks far below--that's the second perspective. Put them together and you have a hill so steep a fly might have trouble climbing up. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it works but not nearly as well as when it's done by an artist. The car still looks good and the ad was fine but we tried it only one more time. 

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