What’s the most relevant business and/or creative lesson you learned in 2020 and how will you apply it to 2021?
The pandemic locked down live-action shoots in 2020, and brands needed alternative ways to deliver their creative concepts. We went back to basics, and what became clear was that in most cases, our clients didn’t need a new shoot to communicate a new idea. With Chapeau’s core artistic disciplines– compositing, design, animation, and CG– we could put existing footage to work bringing fresh brand stories to life.
We dissected stock footage and combined it with user-generated content, layers of animated graphics, design elements, illustrations, and animation techniques. High-end pixel-perfect compositing is what I’ve built my career on, and while it feels “old school” in comparison to the new visual technologies we love pioneering, in 2020 old-school approaches were our most reliable tool.
In 2021, COVID is still very much with us, and clients are asking us to think outside of traditional live action production until further notice. In addition to fulfilling their marketing needs, they are also seeing the efficacy of trusting experienced CG teams to introduce the world to their new products, and the ability of digital artists to give older footage new life.
Gazing into your crystal ball, what do you envision for the industry–creatively speaking or from a business standpoint–in 2021?
My slightly tinted crystal ball is telling me that creative businesses who are embracing bespoke technology should enter 2021 with a careful focus on IP ownership. I always embrace dialog and prefer to collaborate openly, but the hard lesson for boutique creative studios is to properly value our creativity. As creative work shifts to client-direct models, we’ve increasingly been seeing far-reaching NDAs from potential clients that note their ownership of vendor IP, in some cases even before it has been formulated or clearly concepted. For creativity to thrive in 2021 and beyond, we have to collectively insist that clients value creative autonomy as much as they value their own intellectual property. Innovation will be critical in the post-COVID climate, but for creativity to thrive, clients need to incentivize it, invest in R&D, embrace big ideas and give them room to grow, and their brands will blossom in 2021 and beyond.
Tell us about one current project you are working on for early 2021.
The pandemic gave Chapeau the once in a lifetime opportunity to spin up a virtual production practice. We have an LED panel partner now who is as psyched as we are about the future innovation, from simple LED stages to full in-camera VFX.
We’re in our happy place in 2021, out on the edge learning where the breaking point is. The take-aways are gold because the bumps and bruises from our creative testing allows us to confidently teach our clients about why and how we’ll need to restructure production calendars moving forward.
We have a handful of projects lined up for Q1 of this year, and I’m very much enjoying the blue sky idea portion of this ongoing experiment. It’s nice to be able to dream a little. I can hint that I’m focused on what the visual language of your upcoming autonomous journey will look like.
I always want to do the hardest thing first so In-camera VFX is my primary focus. We’re using 1.5mm LED wall panels to support the hyper-photoreal Chapeau quality assets needed to step into Brazilian rainforests, arctic tundras, Mediterranean beaches and New York City streets, all in one day.
How did your company, agency, network, service or studio adjust/adapt to the marketplace in 2020 (new strategies, resources, technology, health/safety expertise) and what of all that bodes well for 2021?
We have a long history of supporting tech clients and managing our organization on a remote basis to service them in-house. As the pandemic and an immediate shift to remote staffing began, we’ve been noting where remote workflows gain efficiencies– and solutioning where they lose them. The demands that distributed operations and a remote workforce places on agencies and production partners challenges all of us to communicate and manage our teams more effectively. I feel lucky in many ways that Chapeau had pre-existing infrastructure and processes to enable distributed work, but even with that head start, we spent the month of April optimizing various remote workflows. We tested more live-streaming video technologies in April than we knew existed before then, and even built our own private, secure cloud server to preserve and optimize our tried-and-true workflows. Our IT teams are really our MVPs of the COVID pandemic.
