How Michael Hili personified motoring monsters

Can you tell us how the concept for the campaign came about?

It started with a simple, brutally true observation from Liesa Wall [CCO], Guy Perry [Writer] and Tim Thach [Art Director] at McCann: drivers, particularly young drivers, know that feeling, the little external pressure that creeps in and whispers go on… just a bit quicker. What excited me was the invitation to literalise it. Make the invisible visible. Put those pressures in the car with you and give them a home ground to exist in, not as an abstract idea, but as something you could feel in the cabin.

The process was fully hands-on: sketching, sculpting, test builds, paint tests, camera tests, rebuilds, the unglamorous craft loop.

Then we pushed it further: if we’re going to build monsters, they can’t be generic fantasy. They have to be born from real human behaviour. Familiar, a bit pathetic, a bit funny… and genuinely unsettling once they get their hooks in.

How much of the production was hand-crafted?

All of it. There’s no CGI and no added 2D or 3D elements. Everything you see, backdrops, streetscapes, and the demons themselves, was built, painted, puppeteered, shot, then composited together in post.

The process was fully hands-on: sketching, sculpting, test builds, paint tests, camera tests, rebuilds, the unglamorous craft loop. We did use digital tools in the design, working with the remarkable Jonathan Zawada on the creature designs, but the final images are resolutely physical.

What was behind the decision to go analog rather than using digital/AI tech?

It’s just how I work. It’s how I’ve always worked.

Can you tell us something about the process of creating the monsters and the sets?

It was conceptual to begin with. We started by looking at the human behaviour behind the demons, not their aesthetics. Who are these pressures? How do they show up? How do they get under your skin? We wanted each demon to feel like a different flavour of temptation, not just a cool design.

We didn’t have the resources, and I wasn’t interested, in outsourcing it to a big SFX house. I wanted to be in it: problems in front of us, being part of the solutions emerging in real time.

Then we worked on the look, which was just really fun. Mashing up car parts with human pieces and other beasts. Each one developed its own identity, I fell in love with them quickly.

Then there was a key decision that was made, keeping the builds close. We didn’t have the resources, and I wasn’t interested, in outsourcing it to a big SFX house. I wanted to be in it: problems in front of us, being part of the solutions emerging in real time. If something didn’t feel right I wanted to be able to be one of the hands to fix it.

Everything evolved. The mechanics, the materials, the scale of the worlds, and always that tightrope walk: finding the right balance of humour, horror and aggression so the demons feel entertaining, but still land in your gut.

Above: Behind the scenes images from the shoot.

How long did the production take, and what were the highs and lows?

A while! I pitched an iterative process, with room to try things, and both the agency and client trusted that in a way that still surprises me. It’s going to be hard to go back to a more traditional, “lock it early and protect it” approach after this.

The EP’s at Finch have always given me space to make accidents, so I pushed that idea to its logical extreme and asked for literal space. They said yes, and we turned the basement of the production office into a proper makers’ studio. I brought in specialists, moulding, scenic painting, puppet makers, chrome painters, model makers, and I could sit in the middle of it all, while still running the usual pre-production and director workflow from the same room.

The shoot days themselves [were] genuinely joyful, with people constantly dropping by to see the puppets in action.

We tried a lot of things that didn’t work, mechanically and aesthetically. And every time something fails there’s that little stab of “why didn’t we make this easier on ourselves?” It can graze your confidence, even when you know it’s part of the process.

But the highs were huge. Sharing the work at every stage was a real joy, watching the client’s face when they first saw the Backseat Whisperer design, seeing the creatives excitement when the builds became real, and then the shoot days themselves, genuinely joyful, with people constantly dropping by to see the puppets in action. That kind of energy feels good.