When Volkswagen came out with their new Beetle, Arnold Worldwide asked us to create this holiday image. Will Uronis was the art director, and a really great guy to work with. Originally, I was thinking we would probably shoot the VW all wrapped up and shoot the ribbon separately. I was expecting that retouching on the car would be needed, and we would combine the ribbon with it digitally.
As it turned out, our stylist, Leslie Fenton and her assistant, did such a great job wrapping it, and found ribbon big enough to match the scale of the car, that we pretty much got it all in one shot. The only extra step was to place some fill cards in front to reflect off the wheels. Another of those clean, on white, shots that I like to much.
We always got lots of stares whenever we had a car shoot. The car would have to be driven through a rear entrance to our building, pushed into the freight elevator and taken to the sixth floor, where we would push it out of the elevator and through the wide double doors to our studio and onto the cyc. So grateful for those huge freight elevators!
VW used the shot for a few years around the holidays, and, one year, we used it as our Christmas card titled “Humbug!”