An innovative story for the Audiences of The Future

Innovate UK’s challenge was to get the word out to inventive storytellers about Innovate UK’s next round of funding.

Innovate UK fund inventive and forward-thinking storytellers to pursue projects on the cutting edge of technology. With the next round of funding approaching, their challenge was to get the word out to the right audience. Finding innovative story-tellers needed an innovative story.

Our concept needed to be appealing – both visually and technologically – and it had to look as good as the quality Innovate UK hoped to attract. Which meant we had creative carte blanche. From our initial storyboard sketches of cavemen around a fire, we created 3D paintings that our camera could swing through and interact with. Our team created detailed 2D paintings and projected them onto 3D models, mixing an old world look with a live action feel.

We’d been pressed by tight deadlines from the start of the project, but when last minute changes were made to the brief calling for extra animation, we realised we needed to rethink our approach to deliver on time.

We developed an innovative new workflow – True Time Rendering. Our tech team plugged our animation sequences into renowned gaming engine Unity, allowing us to create and edit seamlessly. Without the usual downtime for rendering, our delivery time was effectively slashed. True Time Rendering let us screen share work with the client and make amends in a live environment, changing colour and textures to placements and effects on the fly.

Although we animated many of the characters ourselves for specific action, one of the advantages to the Unity-driven approach was the capability to use pre-existing motion capture content. We re-purposed banked content of characters performing unrelated tasks like making coffees and receiving faxes for our narrative (extra points if you can spot them), helping us deliver the project on time. 

It wasn’t just meeting the deadline that made this project a success from our perspective – it was that we didn’t have to compromise on quality to do it. The Audiences of the Future campaign was so successful for our client that they re-tendered to continue the same campaign later that year. And we call that a win.

Get in touch to find out if True Time Rendering could be the right fit for your next project.