Nissan premiered the short action film “The Delivery,” directed by Louis Leterrier and starring Mickey Rourke, Carl Weathers and Raymond Cruz. Nissan needed a digital experience that matched the action and excitement of the film, but also gave people more reasons to engage with their brand.

We set out to design a visually rich, highly cinematic site experience to host the film and provide digital context around it. We maximized theatricality and interactivity, taking creative cues from the look and feel of “The Delivery.” The concept is a stylized version of the film’s desert landscape with 3-D-modeled set pieces that act as the site’s primary navigation. The experience was made entirely from scratch in painstaking detail. Cinemagraphs and video transitions were layered on to give the site a movielike feel. It’s a digital experience that entertains, educates and powers a whole new perspective on Nissan Commercial Vehicles.

The toughness, action and nostalgic cast made “The Delivery” a natural fit for our target – small-business owners and tradespeople in their 30s and 40s. We set out to strengthen that connection by extending resonant elements of the film into an immersive digital experience that was visually stunning and featured engaging and highly sharable content.

We also wanted to maximize time spent, audience education and entertainment value, so our teams created a gallery of original content to drive a deeper connection between Nissan Commercial Vehicles and audiences: a dramatic reading of their best-in-class warranty reading by Raymond Cruz; customizable “Living Movie Posters”; “Action Guides” that humorously incorporate stunts into the average work day; “action Gifs” curated form reactions and quotes from “The Delivery,” designed to be fun and sharable; and much more.

But creating a truly cinematic site experience was the main event – a goal that forced us to rethink our design processes, and invented some new ones. We started with the set pieces and desertscape. Using reference photography from the shoot and online imagery of the physical locations, 3D-model miniatures were created by hand to mimic the actual buildings used in the video. Meanwhile, our photo-realistic environment was built by the same powerful terraforming software program used in Hollywood feature films. Once the set pieces were in place in the digital landscape, we created animations for the transitions using advanced compositing elements, matching everything pixel to pixel.

Getting large image files like these to load seamlessly was a priority, so we implemented a strategy of graceful degradation in our back-end processes. Viewers with older browsers would encounter fewer features, but still have a functional and enjoyable experience. We also deployed a rigorous measurement and feedback regime to track our success.

The site experience achieved the ultimate business goal, driving a 397% increase in lead conversions to actual requests for contact from a dealer.

With an average of 5+ minutes spent on the website and 7.1 million video views (in the first 3 months alone), the success of the campaign is no surprise.??

As the staff of Yahoo! Autos put it, “You will never hear the words ‘corrosion’ and ‘perforation’ quite the same way again.” and we couldn’t agree more.

Badass results for a badass experience.