As people stray from the usual media formats, such as TV and print, carmakers are finding new ways to keep their advertisements spontaneous and unique. Lamborghini created a new way of promoting its road car, the Reventon, with a live event that saw the car accelerate at breakneck speed, while the engine was still turned off.

Lamborghini teamed up with Vancouver-based advertising agency The Media Merchants, and created a live event called The Lamborghini Project. The exclusive event was an audio-visual experience where the organisers used cutting edge 3d projection technology to map colours and shapes over the car, making it look like the surface of the car was moving.

The Lamborghini Project used a soundtrack to emphasise the graphics that were being beamed over the car. As the soundtrack boomed, reflections of lights passed over the car, giving the effect of fast acceleration.

"It's a scalable technique, allowing us to add or remove projectors for the final execution depending on technical or budget considerations, even after the animated content has been produced," says Anthony Diehl, creative technical director on the project "We really tested out the extent of this process on the Lamborghini project and it worked beautifully."

Coming in at a price of $1.5m, the Lamborghini Reventon is the carmaker's most expensive road car, and only 20 have been produced and sold to the public so far. This was the perfect way to communicate the car's high end aesthetic to a small, audience in an intimate setting then bring it to the wider public through the project's video.

"One of the surprising and fun elements of the project was getting everything aligned perfectly and then discovering that we had a pretty awesome VJ setup sitting in front of us,"  says Diehl. "Although it wasn't part of the original plan, we couldn't help ourselves and took the opportunity to run a live VJ set with visuals created in real-time."

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