Since 2004, Toyota has hosted a contest, the Toyota Dream Car Art Contest, where children submit drawings of their dream car. This year, for the first time the company shared the artwork of the 90 finalists through a 90-day Vine campaign, which ran from May 29 to August 31. The artwork is still available to view on the Dream Car of the Day website. Toyota also took the drawings and created 2D and 3D animations of a conceptualized version of the child’s idea to help showcase the drawings. There were more than 660,000 submissions from over 75 countries around the world.
The Toyota Dream Car Art Contest
This contest is one of the largest art contests for children around the world. Every year, children can submit drawings during a set period of time to enter the contest. Anyone under the age of 15 is able to enter a drawing, as long as they live in participating countries. The only restriction in the creation of the artwork is that the children cannot use digital tools. The artwork must be drawn, using any standard medium such as colored pencils, crayons, markers, or watercolors. There are three age categories, 7 years and under, 8 to 1 years old and 12 to 15 years old.
Showcasing the 2014 Finalists
This year, Toyota partnered with creative agency Saatchi and Saatchi Fallon Tokyo to create conceptualized 2D and 3D images of the children’s drawings to showcase the finalists in Vine videos. Vine provides a platform for posting 6 second long looping videos. Each of the 90 finalists’ videos was released during a 90-day campaign, with each finalist having a day dedicated to him or her. This campaign also marked one of the first such campaigns using Vine.
Masanao Tomozoe, President & Chief Executive Officer, Toyota Motor Sales & Marketing Corporation remarked abut the campaign: “I am thrilled by this opportunity to provide a place for kids around the world to express their dreams and to think about the bright future ahead…This online campaign “Dream Car of the Day” was inspired by our wish to let each young artist shine as a hero and have their idea shared with people around the globe.”
Picking the Winners
This year, many of the submitted artworks shared the theme of sustainability, with many of the imaginative designs showing solutions to the environmental issues faced by today’s automotive industry. A panel of judges, both internal and external to the company that included illustrators, designers and the President of Toyota, selected the winners of the contest.
On August 27, the awards ceremony was held at the Mega Web, the Toyota vehicle experience facility in Tokyo’s Koto Ward. During the ceremony, there was one gold, two silver, three bronze and four best finalist awards presented in each of the three age categories. There was also one entry selected for the President Akio Toyoda award. All 31 award winners and their parents and guardians were in patience. In all, they represented 22 countries and regions around the world.
The Gold award winners were Bui Than Mai (age 6) of Vietnam for “Super Crab Car”, Yodsing Jirawat (age 10) of Thailand for “Wat Pho Massage Car”, and Raceanu Iasmina Maria (age 16; 15 at the time of submission) of Romania for “STORYOTA”. Mealaksey Pha (age 5) of Cambodia won the President Akio Toyoda award for “Smart Fish Car.”
Toyota holds this contest every year because it knows that children will be the future innovators. They want to support dreaming and the development of imagination to help fuel the next generation of innovators. The company looks forward to seeing what other innovative ideas children will create for next year’s contest.
photo credit: qJake via photopin cc