Advertising: Mercedes Benz's "Fable"

Stories about speed: what comes to mind? Pretty much just one, in my experience: The Tortoise and the Hare.

Although it's been out for a good couple of months now I only caught it on TV about a week ago and thought I should investigate further for you. This is the Mercedes Benz take on Aesop's well known fable, and they do a stellar job, I have to say.

Here's the ad (see if you can see the cameos by other common Aesop animals throughout):

Poor raven! (Nice story touch, though, I have to say.)

This was an ad that premiered at the Super Bowl in February this year (2015) and the company loved their characters so much they set up Twitter accounts to show the rivalry  - and character differences, and jokes and 'specialized products' - between the contestants.

Here are a few of their photos and you can find the witty repartee HERE for the Tortoise's half, and HERE for the Hare's.

I'm going to include the making-of video as well because, for those filmmakers and storytellers out there, I want you to see what a difference the on-location of an actual forest, with weather, makes, as well as this beautiful scene-building sequence made of a bunch of different elements, broken down so you can see them all added in a little magical sequence of it's own. (Animation buffs, you'll like this whole video too.)

The storybook scene building sequence begins around the 40 second mark and they show you the on-location forest and weather stuff a bit later.

Enjoy!

(You can read and see a whole lot more from the behind-the-scenes process HERE.)
And as a bonus, here are some fun screen shots: