Taking a new twist on the game of cat and mouse, Griffin Bacal Volny and The Players Film Company have come up with a fast-paced, quick-cut, high-energy 30 for Yokohama’s Guardex 600 winter radial tires.

A group of white mice cling to the mesh on a hockey net, wide pink eyes looking tentatively at the slippery ice below, as a cat stalks dangerously close. But spying a miniature red bmw, equipped with Yokohama winter radials of course, the mice squeal with delight and zoom off on the ride of their lives.

Thanks to the control of the winter tires, the Beemers speed along, making sharp turns and quick corners with ease while their pursuer slips, slides and slams into the sideboards. With lots of fast cuts, the mice zoom back and forth across the screen, followed by a floundering feline that has never worked so hard for dinner.

The commercial was developed by gbv creative director Eugene Radewych, who worked on Yokohama’s previous ‘Cat and Mouse’ spot which won a Gold Bessie in 1991. Ross Munroe was copywriter and agency producer was Melanie Fernandez-Alvares.

Players’ Henry Less, who also worked on the earlier spot, was director/dop.

From his experience on the ‘Cat and Mouse’ job, which required shooting mice in a Porsche, Less found that using novice talent worked best.

‘Everyone said you will need trained mice, but the best mice were just average mice, they were fresher, perkier,’ he explains. ‘I kept rotating them so they didn’t get too tired or cold being in an arena all day.’

For the original mouse shoot, Less recounts that the production and agency people sat around in an office for awhile hashing out ways to keep the mice in the car, including using harnesses. ‘We even thought of gluing Velcro to their bums,’ he jokes.

As they wrestled with the dilemma, Less took a few mice out of the cage and set them in the Porsche. ‘When I sat one in the car it automatically jumped out, but I found that if I put them in the car while it was moving, they stayed put,’ he says. ‘It was a real joke at the time, I mean, who would be crazy enough to get out of a moving Porsche?’

Less says finding a cat for the shoot proved more difficult. ‘Cats hate ice,’ he says. ‘They get all freaked out. We tried tons of cats and finally found two that would do it.’

The camera work was the most crucial element since the spot relied heavily on action sequences. To shoot the car chase, Less used a skatecam – basically a skateboard with blades rather than wheels with a camera attached. ‘It enabled the camera to skim the surface of the ice for the action scenes,’ he explains. For more precise shots requiring zooms, he used a dolly with blades. ‘On close-ups I used wide-angle lenses shot close up to make the scenes look bigger, more dynamic and cartoony.’

Chris Cassino edited for Henry Less Productions. With a background in music video cutting, Cassino had the flair required to create the fast-paced, high-energy feel of the spot. Ron Weiss at Ulysses composed the music to accompany the high-speed chase.

Although it was a relatively simple shoot and edit, Less says it was still tough work: ‘Two days on the ice, it was tiringin a cold arena, when it’s warm outsideall the cat problemsworking with mice’