The consumer electronics landscape continues to change–and with it, viewing habits. There is much attention being paid to emerging mobile content delivery services, including Modeo and MediaFlo, Internet video with improved resolution, games, and other alternative fare. Some of these new delivery options are on-demand services, offering viewers what they want, where they want and when they want. But does this represent a real business opportunity for commercial postproduction and visual effects companies? SHOOT surveyed industry artisans to find out the current state of mind and affairs.
Alex Weil, executive creative director, Charlex, New York Reports of the death of the 30-second commercial are greatly exaggerated. That is not to say that the day when an advertiser has to reach out and find audiences in new places and in new ways has not already been here for a while now.
Charlex has created content for Web, mobile and gaming. Most recently we did screen design and animation for one of the big three wireless companies. We also did an award-winning opening for the game “Midnight Club” for RockStar, makers of Grand Theft Auto.
A number of years ago we had a subsidiary, Grain, which specialized in Web site design and Web content but we disbanded it to focus on our core business.
Though our eyes are open to new venues we remain focused on creating mind-blowing visuals for display in any format.
Ed Ulbrich, senior VP, Digital Domain, Venice, Calif. We see all three of those platforms–Web, games and mobile–as major growth segments each presenting considerable business opportunities in the future. Digital Domain artists have already done some amazing visuals for Web and videogame projects and we feel mobile is not far behind.
The best example is an ongoing Web project for VW. We were approached by VW’s ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky to bring the “Build Your Car” feature on the company’s Web site to another level entirely. Browsers, who customize their virtual GTIs, Jettas, and soon the new Rabbit, will experience the car through watching a first-person film that complements VW’s television campaigns. In the film for the GTI, the end-user can take the exact car he or she built online for a test drive, and for the Jetta, the customer can send the car through a series of crash tests. The color, the options, the packages are all according to the selections made. Depending on the selections, characters in the film react differently and say different things. However, with 300 different options and five colors to choose from, doing this movie the traditional way meant shooting 1,500 cars and that is obviously far too time- and cost-prohibitive. Instead, we used some serious computing horsepower and bleeding edge proprietary software to not only create this nonlinear film comprised of thousands of shots, but one that would pop up instantly on your computer screen.
In the gaming space, we are currently creating ads using a game engine for a major game publisher. We are using the publisher’s next-generation, real time HD rendering videogame engine to make spots for cinema, TV and the Web. This is done to be sure the game is represented accurately, but using the game developer’s tools to create ads is a precursor to inserting an ad into the videogame itself. We have all the game assets, all the architecture, and now, should the publisher want to insert an ad into a game, we can do it with ease.
Johnnie Semerad, co-founder/creative director, Quiet
Man, New York Post for alternative content will offer a real business opportunity for commercial makers. As the new/alternative media sector continues to grow, commercial makers are going to have to tap into this industry to continue to move forward and keep up with the ever-evolving tech-savvy consumer. As of now, we have not done any games, but we have worked in other fields. We often aren’t awarded a job, but a campaign. In the past, it would be a TV commercial and print. Now we get full-fledged campaigns for movie theaters, TV commercials, print, billboards, Web, direct mailers, itunes, and cell phones. For Chester “Cheetos,” we even did the art for the bags of chips. We also have a podcast of original content, Josh W, which was picked up by animation distributor Channel Frederator.
Marc Schwartz, managing partner, Fluid, New York We can supply various forms of content but what we’re really talking about is diversified delivery formats and the creative decisions that go along with producing for the large, small, or extra small screen. And yes, we can, and have, delivered high resolution for HD and completed the “One Second Theater” for GE, exclusively for Tivo and DVR recorders, and low resolution for the Web and mobile. It’s all about the budgets though, and how we modify our current business model to include these (products) in our workflow.
Dave Holloway, executive producer, Northern Lights Post, New York
It already has [offered a real business opportunity]. Just this spring, we’ve done webisodes for BMW Motorcycles, MSN/Sprite and USA Network. And partnered with mobile marketers. The work’s better than some of the traditional :30 boards out there yet demands the same precision of our editors. It’s all storytelling, but each medium demands its own special nuances.
Dave Waller, co-owner/visual effects specialist, Brickyard VFX, Santa Monica and Boston We’ve seen some opportunities in providing alternative content here at Brickyard VFX. For the most part, it has been an additional component of traditional jobs. But it’s a steady trickle, not a gush. We haven’t marketed ourselves for the alternative market, and the following projects have been mostly from our existing clients:
- Last fall we created some really fun viral shorts for Volkswagen’s
Web site highlighting features of the new Passat. - For Monster.com, we did a few animations for big screens (Gillette Stadium, the NASDAQ Time Square display).
- For Hummer, the task was to make some off-road demonstrations for its Web site, and the material we created was also used in some other promotional videos.
- Our CG division recently animated a promo for Electronic Arts via Arnson Communications promoting the EA Sports NBALive game. It was projected in 360 degrees as part of a trailer for EA’s recent Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2006 video wall. This was definitely a new format for us.
- ESPN required a special web promotion for their new mobile phone service featuring Trey Wingo.
I think there might be a worry that commercial post houses are just too expensive for this kind of work, but it really isn’t necessarily so. We try to give a competitive bid on all our jobs, and we’re always finding ways to save our clients some money. It really matters on the methodology we use to get the jobs done, and the art of knowing how good is good enough when we’re compositing for the small screens. We love doing new things here, and our artists get excited when they get to apply what they know for new media, so the alternative content work that we do get tends to be a bit high-end. I think a lot of our more traditional projects (like TV spots) wind up recycled as alternative content without us even knowing it –there’s a big demand for content but smaller budgets. At the end of the day, the money is mostly spent on the artist’s time, so whether it’s feature work, HD spots or Web content, it’s all about the hours we put into it.
Jennifer Suttlemyre, general manager, Umlaut, San Francisco I think that alternative content is indeed a viable business opportunity for postproduction companies because there is far more content being created. As a post house we can help projects make the technical transitions from film to alternative mediums. We have done quite a bit of work on this front. We’ve cut a viral campaign for AOL that had great production value. Recently, we created a sound design alphabet with live-action letters. These elements were then integrated into Sprite’s “SubLymonal” Web site in support of its current TV campaign.
Darren Orr, owner/visual effects artist, Spy Post, San Francisco Postproduction for alternative content like games and Web use is a growing opportunity in many ways. It allows for smaller budgets, because the purchase of airtime is eliminated, and very accurate tracking of actual results. The interesting aspect of this from a postproduction standpoint is that most of the commercials that we’ve worked on that were Web-targeted were approached in the exact same way as a for-air commercial. Shot on film, telecined and finished on a Flame–the reason being that so many are either dual-purpose or finished with the idea that if the spot is successful, they will air it later. In some ways, it’s almost being used as a test of the spot’s viability. A great example of this is the recent GameTap commercial we did to promote Pac-Man, which ended up garnering a lot of attention and became much more than it was originally intended to be–developing from a viral spot to broadcast. We’ve also had success with some recent adidas spots for their new Clima Cool shoes, which in the same way went from being a successful Web campaign to running on air.
Harold Moss, creative director, and Tammy Walters, executive producer, Flickerlab, New York As a studio, we focus on both commercial production and creating original content across different mediums, so this area has definitely gotten our attention. While the budgets can sometimes pose a real challenge, there are also real upsides to working in these new media (are we still calling them new?). First, there is such a huge demand for content across so many platforms that there is room to break formulas and take more risks. Concepts that would never fly in a network can be produced and find an audience, creating great opportunities to incubate new ideas. In the commercial realm, the new demand for original content allows us to leverage our storytelling skills into the area.
Online content, in particular, has been steadily growing as a proportion of our business, both for work we’ve been engaged in and bidding.
Overall, we’re finding that we need to conceptualize all the original content and advertising campaigns we’re working on as platform independent. Shows and ads need to be sliceable and diceable, and easy to repurpose for a platform none of us has heard of yet, but that will be all the rage six months from now. It’s becoming increasingly clear that being able to respond to budget and schedule challenges with creative solutions and new pipelines is key to our studio being able to thrive in the new media environment.
