Creating a Macro World for All Seasons

By: Laura Santillana | Lead Creative

It started with “let’s build miniature worlds on a tyre” and ended with these four images. 

Okay, there was a lot more of a brief than that - the client was Goodyear and our goal was to create an engaging social campaign to support the launch of their new Vector 4Seasons range. If you want to read more about the strategy and results, that’s over here. 

What we want to provide here is a little behind-the-scenes look at how we, the Bottle Creative team, got ourselves from point A to B. Because sometimes the process is just as fun as the results. 

So, back to the “let’s build miniature worlds on a tyre” point… Where to begin? 

A plan, of course. Being so tiny, we knew each shot had to be precise - from the positioning of the tyre to the types of the trees and characters. We took some quick shots of the tyre at different angles and worked up some sketches for each season.

Once we’d (roughly) ideated each season, it was time to start sourcing our figures. Staying aligned to the sketches, we scoured the online networks of Model Railway Figures to find exactly what we needed. Turns out – you can acquire almost anything in miniature.

We had been supplied with one tyre and knew that we had to set up all four seasons on it. To give us the ability to set up multiple seasons at once, we decided to cut the tyre in half which gave us a bit more flexibility on how we could position each scene. We quickly learned that cutting a tyre in half is in fact not a simple job – a good testament to their durability, I guess.

Then the real fun began! With two of us Creatives setting up the scenes, we could build one scene each on a tyre half. The plans that we had drawn up were beside us as a sort of artistic roadmap. We set up cameras on tripods to be able to look at the picture through the viewfinder during the process. That helped a lot as moving a figure mere millimeters in any direction could throw off the shot completely.

As you can imagine, getting the landscapes to appear the way we had envisioned was not a very prescriptive process. Many microscopic pieces of white tack would hold the pieces in place while we moved them around to sort out the correct scene. After trying liquid resin, then a mixture of glues to create the water in the Spring scene (above), we settled on cutting a piece of textured clear plastic card for our final effect. Gorilla Glue became our best friend to hold the pieces down in all the final scenes. 

Getting the correct texture for sand was also a tricky job in the Summer Scene (below) as, believe it or not, real sand granules appeared to be too large. What worked a lot better was Rice Krispies, crushed to a pulp. We also wanted one of the figures to be diving off the cliff in that scene, so we glued him to the end of an unfolded staple and poked the other end into the tyre. The staple was then Photoshopped out for the final edit.

Once we had completed and photographed two of the seasons, we flipped each half-tyre around to assemble another season on the other side.

Final little weather touches such as snow, rain or falling leaves were added and each season was shot against a greenscreen background (or grey, or blue) which gave us the ability to use the same backgrounds that aligned with Goodyear's All Season creative campaign that was running at the time.

From there, the shots were finished off with a Photoshopped background and a little tidy up.  

 And there you have it! After 12.5 hours spent on each image, a hell of a lot of patience with a side mess of glue and fake grass, we had created four miniature worlds on a Goodyear tyre. As a digital PR agency most of the magic happens in front of a screen, but we do love to stretch our creative muscles when needed.