Toyota’s GR range and GAZOO Racing heritage has seen the company push the limits of performance and design across their entire suite of vehicles. Something well known to the fans and boy racers, but not the public at large. We needed to create a piece of branded entertainment that would tell this story in a way that would engage more than the traditional GR audience. The objective was to reach a broader audience with the brand’s racing and performance credentials without alienating or disappointing our core GR fanbase.

The film merges camera and car to tell the TOYOTA GAZOO Racing story through ground-breaking live action animation - with no VFX, no post, no green screening.

With a dilapidated Calder Park Thunderdome as the backdrop, hundreds of illustrated frames spanning over 1200m were pasted along the barriers, tunnels and track. Car mounted cameras inside and out of the car then captured the static artwork at speed to create a number of live animations. It was an intricate balancing act of vehicle speed, shutter angle, frame rates, and size and distance between each illustrated frame.

The individual animations and a giant custom-built Zoetrope, tell the stories of Toyota’s long-standing history in motorsport and performance vehicles, the global expansion of TOYOTA GAZOO Racing, finally culminating in a sequence dedicated to the launch of the GR Corolla itself.

It is too early to tell if this has shifted currently held brand perceptions.