Hans Zimmer is an Academy Award-winning film composer who is responsible for some of the most impressive scores of all time, including The Lion King, Gladiator, Inception, and Blade Runner 2049. Movie composers do not often gain much recognition among the general population, but Hans Zimmer is one of the few exceptions. He has a devoted group of intense fans, and he is widely recognized throughout the general movie watching public as the clear leader in music composition for films.

The drive takes place on Angeles Crest Highway (otherwise known as Los Angeles’s “highway into the heavens”), a 66 mile, majestic roadway that was carved out of the San Gabriel Mountains in 1929.

Auto advertising is usually distilled into creative and narratives that focus on a car's design, performance and amenities. It is a banal approach that fails to breakthrough the clutter.

We wanted to lean into the emotional side of driving; the feelings and inspiration that such an experience can evoke. Music felt like the right medium for that, and more specifically, the type of music created for a great cinematic score, meant to both capture and heighten specific scenes.

That led to the crazy notion of, "What if we had Hans Zimmer score a drive in the Range Rover?"

The campaign is headlined by a 2-minute film that documents the process of scoring the drive. The film is housed on a custom built destination on our website, where visitors have the opportunity to listen to the full piece of music (matched to the drive), engage with an interactive map charting the drive, and see some behind-the-scenes photos. To round out the campaign, we included a Range Rover print spread in the January issue of our magazine and promoted the digital content across our website and social media accounts. Finally, and perhaps most important, we packaged these assets for local dealerships in the Los Angeles area so they could tell prospective buyers about the project and potentially bring them to the Angeles Crest Highway.

The Production Process:

We filmed the drive and in-studio footage in May to ensure we delivered the final product by the end of the summer, giving Hans 4-6 weeks to finalize the score. Throughout the development process, Hans worked closely with our studio, the agency, and the brand to align the tone of the score with Land Rover’s overall vision.

The Design Methodology:

From a design perspective, the team’s goal was to combine the brand’s heritage with the musical and scenic aspects of the idea. The font, Spartan, was commonly used in the classic Blue Note album art of the 1950s, a record label known for their striking and unusual album covers. To give the reader a sense of the road’s topography, the webpage morphs in a sinuous manner as the user scrolls down the page.