• Product/Brand - BMW i8
• Spot - Curiosity
• Song Title - Anima
• Composer - Gainsborough
• Publisher - Mute
• Artist - Vessel
• Master Rights - TriAngle Records
• Music Supervisor - Platinum Rye
• Ad Agency - FCB Inferno
• Creatives - Al Young, Owen Lee
• Film Company - Radical Media
• Film Director - Tarsem
• Post Production - Absolute
• Air Date - 14/12/14

The comparison between cars and horses is an obvious one. So there may have been some raised eyebrows when agency FCB Inferno suggested BMW launch its brand new hybrid i8 model with a campaign based on a pre-historic man jumping on the back of a wild stallion for the very first time.

But BMW has been a motoring thoroughbred since the 1930s. And, according to FCB Inferno chief creative officer Al Young, the Curiosity spot endeavours to capture the “exhilaration” and the “primal emotion” of driving its latest model.

Shot completely live on location in Spain, Curiosity took nearly 18 months to reach the screen. During that time Arnold Hattingh at music supervisors Platinum Rye worked closely with the agency “to put together a selection of tracks around the term ‘tension’ which would help them figure out where they wanted to be in a tonal sense and so help inform the final brief.”

“A number of searches at both script and edit stages produced stylistically very different tracks, including some brilliant original compositions,” Hattingh explains.

But it was Anima, the atmospheric instrumental chosen to assemble the very first cut, which ended up staying the course and going to air during the X Factor Finals on December 14.

It is to be found on the 2014 album Punish Honey by Vessel, the pseudonym of an acclaimed 22 year old Bristol experimentalist Sebastian Gainsborough who come to prominence on the influential Left Blank imprint and is now signed to TriAngle Records.

Unsurprisingly perhaps Gainsborough is also published by Mute, whose Licensing Manager Simon Ballard describes him as “an important artist with a unique approach to making music based on tone, texture and timbre…full of the essential elements which come up again and again in sync briefs.”

“Between ourselves and Vessel’s manager Patrick Hanrahan we made sure the album went out to everyone at Platinum Rye when it was released and they worked tirelessly to push it through.” Ballard continues. “This sync may appear to have fallen into on our laps, but it is actually the result of months of hard graft.”