In the not so distant past, when clients asked agencies for work that was ‘faster, better, cheaper’ they were simply told it wasn’t achievable, they had to pick two and sacrifice the other. Want good creative fast? It’s gonna cost you! Want work fast and cheap? It’s not going to win awards, and so on. Nowadays it seems clients have finally got their wish, as Sir Martin Sorrel recently boasted about his S4 Capital and Media Monks model, ’faster, better, cheaper is doing the trick’.
This is a positive sign and he’s certainly not the only player; ‘content studios’ within brands and agencies have successfully re-designed creative production to serve digital media and mobile audiences. This is ideal if you want to bash out some quick live action stills or video with some nice motion graphics, but content studios can only do so much. There remains one significant area that requires expensive outsourcing of highly professional and expensive talent and technology, and that is 3D animation (or CG as it is more commonly referred).
Mobile First CG
So why is CG still so premium? Well, most advertising VFX and animation studios are still built and equipped for traditional ‘adverts’ (preferably of the 30” and above variety). The work these studios create is beautiful and admirable, and does justice to the vision of their agency and production company clients, but the production pipeline is cost and time prohibitive for ‘mobile first’ content. This is a missed opportunity, given the continued rapid growth of the digital and mobile advertising sector.
So how can we make CG animation less exclusive and more accessible for brands to deploy across numerous channels? The shining light comes in the form of ‘real time rendering’ or ‘real time 3D’; technology pioneered by the gaming industry that enables photo real graphics and animation to be rendered in real time. Gaming engines such as Unity and Unreal (from the makers of ‘Fortnite’) have been rapidly improving in recent years, enabling brands to create high quality interactive experiences, most notably in the VR and AR space. When it comes to video content however, these real time rendering ‘engines’ have the ability to truly disrupt the CG content creation pipeline, particularly for mobile.
Non-linear creative
So why is CG so important for mobile and what are the benefits of real time 3D for brands?
From a production standpoint, a major benefit to real time 3D is the ‘non-linear’ creative process, particularly when producing CG content. Traditional animation is built like a house, once built you can’t go back and re-design the ground floor, you’d have to knock the whole house down. Real time is an interactive and iterative process — meaning components are configurable. Environments, assets, camera angles, logos, fonts can all be instantly swapped and adapted. This enables brands to be truly reactive and responsive to audience needs in a way that was never previously achievable with 3D animation.
From a marketer’s standpoint — once a brand’s asset or product is built for real time 3D, it can be deployed at speed across a number of interactive channels, including the web (product configurators), social and e-commerce (CG product videos) or superimposed into the real world via AR experiences.
3dctrl
To help with this, we at Artificial Artists have developed a platform called 3dctrl. The idea behind 3dctrl is to provide brands and agencies full control over their 3D assets, empowering them to create video and immersive content in-house for deployment across a range of media channels. We want to remove the barriers to CG and 3D production and experiences, so that brave clients can create CG animation and immersive experieces themselves, without the need for expensive talent and technology.
Mainstream AR
AR deployment is also becoming far easier and more versatile. AR can now be experienced through the web, rather than through downloadable apps (see apple’s AR Quick Look), through search (see google’s recent announcement), and also through navigation applications (google maps AR is currently available through their Pixel smartphones). The widely predicted launch of more affordable and mainstream AR headsets is likely in the not too distant future, at which point the online and offline worlds will seamlessly merge to create a new ‘blended reality’.
Real time 3D will be the content that drives this space, hence why brands need a strategy and process now to help them create and deploy 3D content and experiences faster, better and cheaper.
