Singing that would make a sailor blush, flashing, hair-raising sartorial travesties, tears, tantrums and downright bonkers behavior: just a few snippets of the sublime entertainment provided by those colorful and often bizarre loyal followers who liven up sport worldwide. That fanaticism is at the heart of TBWA\London's recent Qashqai Car Games 2 online campaign for Nissan, which amplifies the daredevil spirit of extreme sports that exemplified last year's launch campaign.

Centered around the fictional Spanner League blog written by one "Craig Patterson", 2007's Qashqai Car Games world champion, four online films follow the exploits of four amateur teams from Thailand, Poland, Holland and Africa documenting death-defying, and in most cases, ridiculous, stunts. The clips, shot by Stink directing team Lionel Goldstein and co-produced by Czar, will be released and seeded on car, lifestyle and video sites. The first film, released at the end of April, follows Thai wannabe Qashqai champion Num and his faithful pit bull as they attempt to jump through a flaming hoop with a band of madcap musicians strapped to the car with ski boots. More films based around Qashqai products and film bulletins from the "pro-leagues" will follow in the coming months.

The series follows last year's smash hit Qashqai Car Games virals, directed by Minivegas, which featured CG Qashqai cars performing gravity-defying stunts. The films were seen by a staggering 16 million people in 13 countries. The Car Games 2 campaign, launched alongside the more conventional Danny Kleinman-directed "Play With The City" TV spot, aims to create a more personable, narrative-led Qashqai world online by mining the rich creative vein of the outlandish fervor of fictional fans.

Flushed by the success of last year's aerial antics, Nissan loosened the creative leash, say former-TBWA\London creatives Matt Saunby and Adam Chiappe (they've just moved over to AMV.BBDO). "They realised from last year that using humor worked so they wanted us to really push it again this year," explains Chiappe.

The brief was simple: to expand on the car's tough but nimble urban persona. The pair wrote four rough outlines of ridiculous fan antics, and called on Lionel Goldstein to help flesh them out.

The creatives had worked with the directorial team years ago on an Xbox spot, "Ear Tennis", through BBH. The resulting Qashqai films can best be described as a game of vocational Russian roulette. "We said to Lionel Goldstein, 'You can go as mad as you want.' They wanted to try and get us sacked," laughs Saunby.

Working for the web brought creative leeway. "With virals you have much more freedom to create narratives and work with directors... Most clients wouldn't want to have their car on TV with [musicians strapped into] ski boots on it and crashing!" says Saunby.

Alongside that creative latitude came the different challenges that come with working for the web. "In America there's a regulation that you have to have a gag every 10 seconds because if it doesn't come, someone will change the channel," he says. "I think it's quite similar with the Internet so we try and keep the gags coming a lot faster."

Key to Lionel Goldstein's treatment and production was moving away from the CG-heavy first round of work into a pseudo-verité style. "We didn't like the virals they had before because they were very hip. We wanted to make them more real and absurd, but in a painful way, not in a hip, happy way," says Koen Mortier, one half of Lionel Goldstein.

To achieve that aesthetic, the pair used the interview style that served them so well in spots including Axe "Shower" and Nike "Twister". Shooting the first film as a sort of surreal documentary, the right feel was achieved by using a cast of local Thai non-actors. Prepping the cast was kept to an absolute minimum with little scripting, lots of improvisation on set and few takes.

"The [talent] didn't even know what was going to happen sometimes," says fellow director Joe Vanhoutteghem. "They'd have to do something totally crazy, they'd be astonished and they'd say something, and sometimes it turned out funny."

To keep the documentary touch while treading the fine line between the believable and the ridiculous, many of the fantastic stunts were shot in-camera, featuring preposterously fake-looking dolls on real flying vehicles. "The challenge was to combine the stunt and CGI together with our [lo-fi] world," says Vanhoutteghem.

The eight films (each team's story is cut into two) were, remarkably, shot over just four days, all in southern Belgium. "They worked wonders for what we did with the budget," Saunby offers. "In some ways the shoot was just as big as Danny Kleinman's."

Mortier says driving rain during the shoot did make conditions difficult for the German stunt team tasked with bringing off the jump through the flaming hoop, which was one of the very few things corrected in post to make it all the more impressive.

So with all the twisted zeal that went into creating these oddball narratives, was it a thrill to watch? "No, it was really boring," sighs a deadpan Vanhoutteghem. "We're not that young anymore. You wait two hours and see a car drop in the valley, and you say, 'Oh, that's it?' I even filmed it and I missed it. That's how exciting it all was."

TBWA\London http://www.tbwa-london.com
Stink http://www.stink.tv
Czar http://www.czar.com