Hasta La Ideas

Porsche fans went into a frenzy, at least on the internet, when this cameraphone video of a new, secret Porsche model first surfaced on a Czech website:

Only problem? The car doesn’t actually exist, and was part of an elaborate hoax cooked up by the American branch of TopGear.com (as a joke) and executed by the staff interns:

The fake Porsche was designed by Matt DuVall, a digital arts student at Savannah College of Art and Design, using Maya, a 3D animation software. He pulled a 3D rendering of a Porsche Cayman off the Internet and modified it into a small two-door wagon, called a shooting brake.

“It’s definitely a polarizing design,” Mr. Holstein said. “Some people love it, some hate it, but we wanted it to feature enough cues from the Panamera’s design vocabulary to pass as a potential Porsche product….”

…They were also fastidious with the details, applying Porsche development wheels, black tape on the front headlights and a front bumper that mimics other Porsche mule photos. Even the license plate number was selected to resemble proper Porsche development plates.

Eventually, the fake shooting brake was rendered in HD and then downgraded in size and quality to appear as if it were shot with a camera phone and output in FinalCut Pro. The video clip was shot in an alley in Brooklyn.

…”Matt shot HDR to get the reflections right on the car, which meant shooting 360-degrees with a still camera with a fish-eye lens mounted and stitching it all together in Photoshop,” Mr. Holstein said.

[Planting the video was done by] another summer intern, Jon Masters, a master’s student in media studies at the New School in New York City. He placed links to the video in Porsche enthusiast sites, alerted sites like Autoblog, Jalopnik and inserting a fake screen shot from Forza 3 in the requisite fan forums. “It was originally posted on a Czech Forza fan site–in Czech to add a layer of deception and plausibility,” Mr. Holstein said.

via wheels blog

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