The Long Drive
Home.
Sell the new Thar without showing the spec sheet. Sell the feeling of going home, the long way.
A 90-second film for the Thar Earth launch, shot over nine days in Ladakh and one in a Mumbai garage. We wrote it as a father-and-son short, then stripped out every line that wasn't the engine, the road, or the wind. The cut that aired is the cut we showed in the very first edit review. Twice.
The idea.
Mahindra came in with a launch brief: position the new electric-hybrid Thar as the SUV for the long-haul family driver. The deck had charts. We didn't open the charts.
Instead, we asked one question: what's the longest drive you remember? Everyone in the room had the same shape of answer: a father, a kid in the passenger seat, a route that took them home the slow way. That became the spine.
A car ad survives the next twelve months on one thing: whether somebody, somewhere, remembers what the road sounded like.
The shoot.
Nine days in Ladakh in October. Khardung La, Nubra, Pangong, with two car rigs, a single-camera A-cam team and a drone op who'd shot the previous Mahindra reel. We carried no playback monitor for the wide shots. The director called every take from inside the car.
One unplanned moment, a sandstorm on Day 6 that grounded us at a dhaba for nine hours, became the closing scene of the film. The producer's coffee mug is in the corner of the frame. We left it in.
The cut.
Two review rounds. The first cut went to the CMO and the agency together, in the same room. We took five minutes of notes and shipped the second cut with three frames removed. That was the master.
The 90-second hero ran across YouTube pre-roll, prime-time TV, and a single 60-foot wall projection at the launch event. A 30-second TVC, a 15-second skippable, and seven vertical reels came out of the same nine days of footage.