Any sports fan knows that the tailgate party is the quintessential moment of sports fandom. In parking lots across the nation fans gather pre-game for hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, ice cold beer in hand and celebrate the comradery of fellow fanmates with an energy unrivaled, stoking themselves up to cheer for the big game. It's the ultimate way to honor ones love for your sports team of choice and at its center lies the vehicle you tailgate around. So, this week on Motor City Masters our contestants are being asked to create the Ultimate Sports Fan Experience in a vehicle designed for tailgating. Only six contestants are left to compete and both teams are running for a touchdown with their Extreme Chevy Suburban based Conceptualizations in this week's team based challenge. Who will be sent home this week and who will be immune from elimination?
In this week's individual challenge the remaining six contestants were tasked with (after having their names drawn randomly from a bag) choosing from a variety of sports equipment in order to be used as inspiration for a new concept car sketch that will give a fresh definition of the term "sports car". Chunner is chosen first and he decides to pick a Football as his design inspiration. Shane's name is chosen second and he decides to pick a Hockey stick as his inspiration. Bryan is next and chooses a pair of Soccer Cleats as his design inspiration. Camillo chooses a baseball helmet as his design element. Jameson chooses a tennis racket and finally Darby chooses a golf club being that it is the only piece of equipment that is left to choose. They are all given one hour to sketch a new concept vehicle based on these elements. After a little bit of deliberation from the judges and a short review of each contestant's sketch Bryan and Chunner are chosen to head up this week's teams with Chunner being immune from elimination for this week's episode. Bryan's concept sketch really epitomized Soccer with its use of cleats and shaping whereas Chunner's vehicle really showed off elements from football such as the front end looking like a mouth guard and the wheels having shapes that evoked that of Football Goal posts.
Next the teams are chosen and Bryan's team ends up consisting of Jameson and Shane whereas Chunner decides to work with Camillo and Darby. The teams break and get to work on their fantasy sports tailgate party vehicles. Bryan's team gets off to a fairly slow start. They decide that they would like to create and interior sports party concept very much having the seating set up like a limo, but after much conceptualization they realize the interior of the vehicle is far too small to have this sort of space. So, what do they do to solve this problem? They decide to create a roof that actuates out from the vehicle on hydraulic arms to open up the space and allow them to incorporate the space design they had previously discussed. They aptly dub their vehicle the GO standing for Game On. Chunner's team decides to use an actuator concept utilizing hydraulic lifts for thier concept as well to open up the vehicle and give them more space but in opposition are shooting more for an exterior tailgate party concept complete with summit peak stadium box umbrella shaded seating and a fold out astro turf viewing area coming out of the rear of the vehicle with televisions mounted on the side and top of the vehicle. They dub their concept the GTX standing for Game Time Experience vehicle.
Bryan's design ends up hitting a snag when they quickly begin to realize that their actuating portion of their vehicle is proving to be more complex than intended for the Auto Technician team to pull off and it ends up putting them behind for the first half of the show. Chunner's team, on the other hand, gets off to a fast start and their pacing never slows down. Both concepts end up hitting their fair share of snags during the fabrication process though and they really end up cutting it close to the three day time limit. Once completed both vehicles have their own separate "Wow" factor. Bryan's vehicle on the outside is very much a simple Suburban design, but when it parks and begins to open up you see that they have really expanded on the amount of utilized space within the vehicle by allowing one half of the side to fold out gull-wing style. Chunner's vehicle, however, has a very large outward appearance and extends even further when parked and opened. Both team leaders chose completely different color design schemes. Bryan's team went with a red and black theme whereas Chunner went with White and green to represent a field of play which would span all sports evenly. Our Vintage Flatz Flat Black was used on Chunner's vehicle as accents and our Vintage Flatz Satin White was used on Bryan's for the wheels and accents as well. The judges have a very hard time deciding which team to choose will win this week being that both designs were so well conceived and executed. And we end up with quite the surprise ending too. Just when you think that they are going to shift into an overtime match to decide a winner the judges conclude that this week's episode will be a tie and that no one will go home. Tune in next week where the contestants will be challenged with transforming the entire interior of a Chevy traverse and we will be one episode closer to finding out who will be Chevrolet's Motor City Master!
The early throws of Summer heat are beginning to take their toll across the Nation. As the temperatures rise the crowds are quickly migrating towards the beaches for bikinis, volleyball, surfing, tans and the crashing ocean waters to cool off in. So, it comes as no surprise that this week's episode of Motor City Masters is taking us to the beach to explore the surfer lifestyle and design aesthetics associated with the automotive industry. I believe most of us have an iconic idea of what it is that makes up the traditional beach vehicle. We might imagine, perhaps, a 57 Chevy with a surfboard sticking out of the trunk as Beach Boys tunes float across the airwaves from the vehicle's AM radio and teenagers are crowded around the car in vintage swimwear dancing in the sand. Others might be drawn to imagining a similar surf party but with the Woodie concepts of the 50's and 60's being the vehicular centerpiece of the Beach Party. Continuing with this concept in mind Motor City Masters decided to challenge their contestants in this week's individual contest by asking them to create a Tonneau cover which would encompass all of these ideas while showcasing their own individual design flare. They were given two hours to complete the task using airbrushes on a blank white tonneau cover for a Chevy Silverado. This week the two designers that stood out above the rest to the judges were JoAnn who is a seasoned veteran of the airbrush painting world having not only airbrushed many a surface and won multiple awards for her work she is also a published author for airbrush design concepts. The other designer who stood out in the individual challenge this week was Darby, who had never even picked up an air brush before but quite quickly took to its use and created a very smooth surf aesthetic on her tonneau. It was quite a hard tie between the two designers for which tonneau best suited the task at hand but it was decided that Darby would be safe guarded from going home this week, making her the winner of the individual challenge. Teams were quickly chosen being that there was an even, and now lessening number, of contestants and the teams consisted of Darby choosing: Camilo, Doc Sab, and Chunner to work with her. While JoAnn chose Jameson, Bryan and Shane to join her team.
The two groups were then asked to create two Chevy Silverado pickup trucks that would epitomize the Ultimate Beach Vehicle. But, there was one caveat, they must incorporate a panel conceptualization into the design as being one of the more prominent features of the completed project. This again harkens back to the Vintage Woodie Cladding concept and quickly became the underlying theme of this week's challenge.
Darby's team got off to a very quick start and decided that they wanted to do a cladding that not only paid homage to vehicle design aesthetics of the past but pushed the paneling featured into a future mindset. In doing so they created this concept of a cladding exoskeleton that would actually wrap around the front end of the vehicle and glide back across the doors and continue up to the back portion of the truck's cab where two surfboards would sit on diagonal surf wracks allowing the truck bed to still have space to transport people or a cooler full of cold drinks perhaps. They chose a very bright color scheme of green paint for the main body and used our Vintage Flatz Blue on their ExoSkeletal cladding in order to make the vehicle really stand out and make a bolder statement. They dubbed the vehicle the "MMX" which stood for Motor City Masters ExoSkeletal and the overall design was very much a completed concept.
JoAnn's team got off to a slower start and bounced around several ideas about how the overall curvature of the vehicle needed to be extended and transformed to almost give it a Dune Buggy feel. Most importantly they were working under the concept that they wanted to create a social beach vehicle, a truck that could be the center of attention for those utilizing it for trips to the beach. They finally agreed on widening the wheel base, extending the fenders with flares, giving the front end a bigger presence and decided to incorporate a wood paneling sun deck tonneau cover with surf board wracks built in. They then dubbed their vehicle the "Makai" which is Hawaiian for "to the water" a very rich name for their Ultimate Beach Vehicle concept. After much deliberation JoAnn's team ended up talking her into lessening the use of the wood cladding on the vehicle and although their concept was a fluid and a complete package she knew this was the main focus of the competition and she was afraid it might end up costing their team a loss.
Trutv brought in a special guest host this week that also fit nicely with the Summer beach theme. Professional surfer, bikini model and beach clothing line executor Malia Jones. After introducing the vehicles and much deliberation after hearing each team leader explain the vehicle's concepts (notably Darby's presentation has obviously evolved to a better place since the first episode) . There was much interest in both vehicle concepts between the judges as well as a little bit of shared criticism. Darby's team was announced as the winners for their forward thinking panel concept that considered a design that would push boundaries outside the box. Finally it came down to a consideration of who would be sent home this week. It boiled down to a choice between sending Shane home or sending Joann home. This would be the third time that Joanna had been in the final elimination stage and ultimately it was decided that she would be sent home and Shane would stay which not only made for great televison it has sparked much debate between the viewers in the decision's wake. We're now down to 7 contestants gunning for Motor City Master and the competition really heats up next week as they attempt to design life sized Hot Wheels vehicles with a Chevy Impala as the design base. Tune in Tuesday night on Trutv to see the designs come to life at 10 pm EST/ 9pm CT/7 pm PDT (check your local listings for show times in your area). Thanks for joining us here at Vintage Flatz we hope you'll tune in next week for our episode recap!
(Aired 7/1/14)
Michael Bay's latest scifi installment Transformers: Age of Extinction is currently playing in North American theaters. As film enthusiasts who love cars may already know, the film franchise has always featured new Chevrolet vehicles as the film's protagonists: the iconic Autobots. So, it comes as no surprise that this week's challenge revolves around the designers creating automobiles that would reflect a Transformer concept car. This week the teams were headed up by Camilo Pardo and Bryan Thompson who won the individual challenge, which consisted of each contestant creating a piece of metalic art that would best aesthetically represent them as an artist. Camilo Pardo chose Kevin Chun aka Chunner, Doc Sab and Jameson Neumann to be on his team while Bryan Thompson chose Darby Barber, Troy Spackman, Shane Baxley and Joann Bortles.
Bryan's team decided to go with an underground mole/spy concept dubbing their Autobot "Boomerang" and Camilo's team decided to go with a small package with underlying big performance and named their character "Sonic Boom" for their vehicle conceptualization. This week brought along a lot more tension than the series premiere between the contestants. Watching the judges in the final portion of the episode you could really tell that they were having a hard time deciding between which design they thought fit the task set forth the best. Ultimately it was the overall cohesiveness of Camilo's team design that won this week's challenge. Both vehicles utilized Vintage Flatz Flat Matte Black as a key design element: the accent work to really bring out some of the more important design lines in the vehicles once they were fabricated.
