Digital Design Students Score National Exposure for Their Super Bowl Ad

University of Cincinnati design students have a strong creative drive. So much so that one recent design project to create a Super Bowl ad for General Motors’ Chevrolet brand was just featured on national television.

Digital design students Ashley Keene, 22, of Mason; Kurt Koch, 22, of Delhi; and Julie Tran, 21, of Mason – all enrolled in UC’s

top-ranked

College of Design Architecture, Art, and Planning (

DAAP

) – teamed up last fall to create an animated ad on behalf of Chevy, all part of a national competition providing students the opportunity to design an ad to be aired during the Super Bowl on Feb. 4, 2007.

And while the DAAP students’ ad wasn’t ultimately selected for production from among the more than 800 entries received by GM, it was creative and humorous enough to still land on national TV – featured during CBS’s The Early Show in mid-January.

“It’s a 30-second, animated ad where a Chevy is personified as a kid,” explained Keene. “We came up with the idea after considering how different demographic groups think and feel about cars. For adults, a car may represent status or no more than a practical need. An adult has to be concerned about whether the car works, am I going to be stuck in traffic… . A kid thinks about a car as the chance to ‘go somewhere neat.’ After all, kids are always saying things like, ‘Can I go too?’ or ‘I want to go! I want to go!’ when there’s a chance to for a car trip.”

So Keene, Koch and Tran – with guidance from Ben Meyer, assistant professor of design – set out to create an ad that captures the sense of fun that children generally associate with a car. That’s how they came up with the idea for their commercial, titled “Gonna Be Friends.”

It features an animated playground scene where kids are playing with Chevy cars just as though the cars are kids too. For instance, the ad depicts a little girl on a teeter totter while the car is her playmate on the other end. Needless to say, the weight differential makes it impossible for her to push upward to reach the top-end position.

Or, there is another scene where cars’ doors are open, each car’s doors serving as arms/hands to hold hands with a line of children playing Red Rover. As one line of children and cars hold “hands,” a child from the opposing line runs over and tries to break those hand-held bonds by running through the line. However, the running child actually knocks himself out against by running himself into a car door.

The UC design students literally and figuratively knocked themselves out for this project. For instance, before beginning animation, they actually took a pick-up truck (owned by Koch) to a nearby park and acted out scenes that were later realized in animation. “We acted it out in order to figure the camera angles we were going to have to create,” explained Keene. “And yes, we did run ourselves into the truck to test the Red Rover game.”

And no one noticed three college students running themselves into a truck? “We picked a secluded spot,” said Keene.

The three students were surprised to learn that their handiwork would air on CBS. Tran explained, “Because our school quarter starts later than other colleges, we were late to jump into the challenge… . We had a little less than three weeks to work on our commercial so that meant plenty of late nights to get it done on time and to our satisfaction.”

One reason the DAAP students proved to be such a winning team is that they are a team that has worked together before. All three shared a co-op quarter last summer at American Greetings Interactive in Los Angles. Koch recalled, “We had a lot of fun together on that co-op so it was nice to come back together and work on a project where we were again a team, but this time, in complete control of the project.”

All three students from DAAP’s internationally recognized School of Design will be watching the Super Bowl come Feb. 4, paying even more attention to the commercials than is usual. Stated Keene, “I’ll definitely be watching this year for the winning Chevy commercial to see how it compares with ours.”

To see the “Gonna Be Friends” animated commercial created by Keene, Koch and Tran, go to this YouTube site.