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November 2022 - Staying Active: A Burst of 'grams

Throughout all of fall 2022's events, we continued to execute on our "Staying Active" Instagram post idea. We completed our mountain hike, we kayaked across wide lakes in Ontario's Frontenac cottage country, we cycled the many pathways near our city, and we sailed Luke's Laser 2 dinghy in the wide waters of the Ottawa River (and crashing the drone into its sail and into the river was a super-fun part of that). We were finally able to pull it all together by the end of October, and finally had it ready to go by the first day of November. I think you may find the result corny, maybe geeky, maybe nerdy. But I think it also shows that we had energy about The GTS Chronicles - and that energy just had to go somewhere:

You can see the post directly on instagram here. Or, you can watch the clip directly below:
The GTS Chronicles IG Post 059 - "Staying Active"

"Staying Active" continued to be our mantra even after the release of its namesake video post. The idea pipeline was revved-up, and related content for more neat posts to The GTS Chronicles instagram channel was flowing well. Next up, we crafted a short clip that captured a bit of the progression of our builds. We called this post "A subtle color shift":

You can see the post directly on instagram here. Or, you can watch the clip directly below:
The GTS Chronicles IG Post 061 - "A Subtle Color Shift"

Then came a great idea: make something spiffy out of friend Winston's recent purchase of a used Cayman S from Christina at Porsche Centre London. And I don't know how it came to mind, but I soon put together a silver mid-engined sports with the name Winston and thought of ... Pulp Fiction. As in, the stylish Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction movie from the '90s. And the cool scene where "Winston the Wolf" - a classy crime scene cleanup guy, played by Harvey Keitel, drives a '91 Silver Acura NSX and cleans up the aftermath of messy murders. Silver mid-engine sports car: check. The name "Winston": check. Cool ass guy: check. We could work with this, and create a little parody thing.

We spent a day or two storyboarding and capturing a few closeup clips of some transition elements and a brief bit in front of the Porsche dealership sign. The rest was filmed at a dead-end bit of street, where we recreated the famous Pulp Fiction scene with Winston the Wolf's '91 Silver NSX pulling up to the camera (see this YouTube clip for a reference as to what we were trying to mimic). We tried to match up the scenes as best we could, right down to the font of the subtitling and the lowering of the view as the car comes to an abrupt stop right in front of the camera.
The Wolf Shoot
The Wolf Shoot
If you are at all a Pulp Fiction aficionado, you'll recognize what we were trying to achieve. You might even notice that I bothered to match the license plate:

You can see the post directly on instagram here. Or, you can watch the clip directly below:
The GTS Chronicles IG Post 062 - "The Wolf"

I was kinda proud of the Wolf clip - I think it showcased how we could create some relatively polished media content, and hoped that - in addition to providing a bit of entertainment - some media person at Porsche might just say "hey these guys don't totally suck at making content; their story is pretty nerdy and grassroots, different yet endearing; this could be something we work on together to produce something quirky and different".
Low-res 981 3D Model
We had a couple of other good ideas for video content in November - one example was sourcing or making small scale models of our cars, and build up a mountain diorama with twisty roads, and then film us both doing a little-kid style brrrrap-brrrap up and down the cool roads. But it was surprisingly hard to find a couple of Boxster and Cayman GTS models that were the same scale and that were not ridiculously overpriced. We did explore the idea of printing a Boxster GTS and a Cayman GTS from 3D-models - an even printed a row-res prototype model of a 981-generation Cayman as a start. But idea never really gained enough steam and our days were too busy with other things, so we ended up passing on this idea (woulda been fun, though).
November 15, 2022 - Another Failed Prediction

November 15 came and went, and with it, my latest allocation prediction. The high and the enthusiasm (for our potential allocations) that we had felt after our recent visit to Porsche Centre London, well, it had lasted for a couple of weeks, but was now fading fairly quickly. Porsche Centre London had gone silent again, and disturbingly, the forums were now lighting up with a burst of reports of buyers receiving their allocations. It also didn't help that we learned of another ship incident that had happened shortly after the Felicity Ace sinking that had also forced Porsche to rebuild some lost cars. All of the usual paranoid thoughts came flooding back: Did this mean we'd been bypassed? Did we need to add yet more Exclusive Manufaktur options? (in fact, in the background we had been scanning and re-scanning the Porsche configurator's option list for the GTS, identifying and debating virtually every Exclusive Manufaktur option that existed). In the long-running "Callout to Canadians" post that Luke had created, I posted a somewhat frustrated entry that captured my mood. You can read that post by clicking here.

We ended up spec'cing a further upgrade to our builds - adding in the Carrera sport five-spokers and switching our caliper colors. But we decide to defer delaying telling Porsche Centre London about a yet-further-upgraded build. It was probably wise to be judicious about how we spaced out our little pay-to-play crumbs...

Late-November 2022 - Hello, Carpokes!

Speaking of the forums, we decided in November (based on some advice from Dave, i believe) to introduce ourselves on a third website: Carpokes (I know - totally not a name that evokes "Porsche"). Anyway, Carpokes had been started by a couple of Porsche owners who I think wanted to explicitly create a site that was "nice". "friendly". Different from the sometimes contentious and combative tone that one found on the most popular Porsche online forum, Rennlist.com. We got introduced to Larry and Tom, the owners/maintainers of the site, and they were pretty keen on the idea of us posting there and helping expand the sites popularity (it was still a relatively new and small site). They even let us design a sort of "ad" for the GTS Chronicles that ran in the website's top advertising banner. This is the rotating banner ad that we submitted for use in the forum:

The rotating GTS Chronicles banner ad that the carpokes.com website allowed us to put at the top of their online forum.

We also published a first post on carpokes, basically introducing myself, Luke, and the whole GTS Chronicles idea. Much like we did on the other two major online forums and to countless contacts over the past year.
The Stubborn fruit tree of collaboration
Dave Shakes the Stubborn Fruit Tree

Imagine, for a moment, a fruit tree. Imagine a fruit tree that you have planted but which, despite all your best efforts - pruning, watering, removing overhanging foliage, dealing with attacking pests, you just can't get it to bear and then drop fruit. This metaphor is a good one for how we were feeling at this point. We just weren't scoring that one big, beautiful juicy fruit of media collaboration. Wasn't for lack of trying, let me tell you. Green leaves, lots of little buds, maybe even some fruit high up on the branches, but none that had yet fallen out of the tree and into our hands. We of course were hoping for the kind of fruit that you break open and out pops a media contact, a storyboarding crew to go over your story idea, contribute ideas, assist with shoots, heck, maybe even arrange a couple of allocations so you can actually get started filming said great story. Nope, no fruit like that yet.

The outreach to the Porsche marketing executives via Linked-in had come to naught. Dave Renner's Porsche Global Community contacts so far seemed to be carefully avoiding any response regarding anything GTS Chronicles related, and the referrals by Dave and Ronan McGrath to Porsche Canada's head of media relations - Patrick St Pierre - had also not borne fruit. The initial enthusiasm by Michael at Porsche European Delivery Canada had petered out (Luke had even recently left some voicemails and they simply went unanswered). Maybe someone had told him to cool it with respect to "those Chronicles guys". And from our own dealership - Porsche Centre London - well, they had never really shown any real inclination of being at all inspired or interested in media collaboration regarding our project. Despite apparently having a marketing department.

I'll stop at this point and remind you that we realized we were not owed any sort of collaboration. We weren't entitled to anything special. Therefore we didn't expect any collaboration, but still, we hoped that someone would feel the same enthusiasm we did and would want to work with us on it.

But I really must give a shout-out to Dave Renner in this regard. Not being directly involved in any way with our sales, he had nothing personally to gain from helping us, yet throughout the fall he worked his butt off for us. Advocating in many of the emails with his Porsche friends and colleagues. Repeatedly. None of it actually elicited a real response with an offer for collaboration, but boy ... it wasn't for lack of trying. You shook the fruit tree, Dave, and you shook it hard. Thank you! I suppose ... I suppose nothing is ripe, yet.

A small snippet of the supportive work Dave Renner did on our behalf.
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