Each movie is often 60 minutes, but at the suggestion of the think tank, each movie is compressed to less than 12 minutes, becoming a veritable “micro movie”. The think tank’s proposal made sense, because in that era, a 60-minute movie required 5 hours to download, and potential audiences (and consumers) were likely to lose patience.
The first season of “The Hire” contains 5 stories, the protagonist is the driver played by Clive Owen. Irving was not well-known in Hollywood at the time and often played supporting roles.
In this series, the protagonist he plays drives a beautiful BMW car for various adventures and delivers “goods” to the destination. The later Hollywood film series “The Transporter” (domestic translation of “very human trafficker”) was inspired by BMW’s microfilm.
In order to make this series more cinematic, BMW spent US$15 million (90% of the total cost) to hire top international directors, including China’s Lee An And Wong Kar Wai. Directors not only have generous remuneration, but also have absolute say in their own scripts, and BMW will never interfere.
In addition, they also invited smashing stars, including Madonna and James Brown.
This way the team received very good feedback. When people watch this series of micro movies, they often forget that this is a “soft advertisement” made by BMW. According to creatives inside BMW, “This is not an advertisement. We do not impose restrictions on the creative team. But from a budget point of view, these costs are similar to high-end advertising.”
Release: release news to the media and give away a copy of DVD
In addition to putting a lot of effort into production, BMW has also used a lot of brains for the promotion of this series: it completely promotes this series of microfilms as movies—playing trailers and sending them to magazines Cover, put posters at the entrance of the club, advertise to some media, and “accidentally” leak news of the movie to other media. BMW also gave free DVDs of movies to VIP subscribers of Vanity Fair magazine.