Little green and red men leap out of traffic signs and slug it out in a parking lot. A bridge is created out of nowhere as a truck approaches the edge of a cliff, allowing safe passage to the other side. Beads of condensation cover the screen as a man takes a sip from a cold drink. A stadium filled with adulating fans rises from the ground. None of this happened, of course, but it can all be seen happening in TV commercials, thanks to the magic of computer-generated imagery (CGI).
“No two jobs are ever the same,” explains Tarek Masri, managing director of Blackstone Studios, a Dubai-based visual effects and 3D-animation company, explaining the charm of employing CGI in advertising. “They’re asking you to recreate reality.” Blackstone boasts a list of advertising agency heavyweights such as Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, JWT and Memac Ogilvy as clients.
Dubai represents an emerging market for post-production companies, with several arriving in the last few years. It’s an attractive destination for professionals, as it is easier to carve out a niche for your company here than in an already saturated market, such as Europe. But competition is not limited to Dubai. Local ad agencies often head to Europe and East Asia for CGI work. “We know what we’re up against,” says Michael Stiebel, marketing consultant with the Dubai branch of post-production company Optix Digital, as he gives us a tour around his company’s Media City facility.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS. Stiebel talks us through the service his company provides. Once a film is shot, Optix receives the negative, he explains, and it is loaded into a million-dollar machine called the spirit telecine, which hums away in a dark room. The telecine’s scanner processes individual frames, before the film is graded on a monitor that is calibrated once a week. Then the fun starts.
The film is edited in offline edit suites, which essentially means it is not yet of broadcast quality. This allows on-the-fly alterations and CGI additions to different versions of the film. Once the client is satisfied with one version, it is moved to the online suite. The edited data produced by the offline process passes through a gadget called “Smoke,” which sends the information back to the main digital disc to be edited so it’s ready for broadcast. “Now it starts getting expensive,” says Stiebel. At this point the company starts desperately hoping clients do not demand additional changes.
The tour reveals an intricate process, at the end of which a compelling product is formed. It is, however, a little like watching behind-the-scenes footage of Lord of the Rings, and realizing the actors are sometimes staring at blue screens instead of talking trees. It’s informative, but it kind of spoils the magic.
And it really is an arduous and time-consuming business. Stiebel illustrates the sheer volume of work that goes into creating even the simplest screen trickery with an example from the movie Marie Antoinette, where the heroine speaks to her husband as a CGI-battle rages in the background.
“How many shots, how many thousands of soldiers, how many cannons, how many guns, how many savages, how many dead bodies?” he asks.
BIG BANGS, BIG BUCKS. Turning imaginings into reality doesn’t come cheap, of course. Stiebel describes a scene from the blockbuster Independence Day in which a spaceship destroys the Empire State Building. He reckons it would take his team four months to recreate it from scratch – “No one is allowed to be impatient,” he says – and would cost around $2.5 million.
CGI production is not for the financially faint of heart, then. “The advertising thinking behind CGI is not about money, it’s about how I can make my product look special,” Stiebel says. A middle-of-the-road product can be elevated to elite status through the use of CGI to create a “wow” factor and avoid the me-too aspect of traditional techniques such as celebrity tie-ins.
Often, though, regional clients will find the time and cost required for something so intricate to be prohibitive, and will demand run-of-the-mill, happy-family ads instead. “In the UAE, there are far too many moms in the kitchen,” Stiebel grumbles. CGI is more appealing to Western and multinational advertisers because their advertising needs “to be clinical... not so warm and fuzzy,” he says.
While use of CGI in advertising is fairly common in Europe, the trend hasn’t really caught on in regional ads. Stiebel attributes this partly to a lack of exposure to CGI ads, which means copywriters are reluctant to attempt ideas that incorporate such techniques. In addition, the UAE is “a fairly undisciplined market,” in terms of media, marketing and production planning, he says, meaning campaigns are often not planned early enough to allow for a time-consuming CGI masterpiece.
Regionally, clients still prefer to rely on humor and the safe play for emotional impact. There are exceptions, however. Blackstone’s Masri believes there is a tendency to undersell a client’s willingness to try something new. “People will complain, ‘Clients don’t like this and clients don’t like that,’” he says. “But the responsibility for creativity and pushing boundaries lies with both parties.” He cites an ad Blackstone created for the Saudi Arabian insurance company Tawuniya, of a world made entirely of water, as an example of the artistry possible with a pure CGI effort.
HUMAN TOUCH. A common complaint about CGI-based ads is that they lack authenticity and emotion. Stiebel, for one, believes this is an outdated concept. With so much great CGI work being produced around the world, he says, its artificiality is no longer a problem. “As long as the image is acceptable and beautiful and impressive, you don’t care too much whether it is CGI or live action,” says Stiebel.
He does admit, though, that CGI advertising is now so ubiquitous in many parts of the world that its impact has been diminished, something companies need to guard against here.
“It is tough to get people to wow. Nevertheless, CGI has its place and is very elegant if used well,” Stiebel says, citing the Audi R8 Web site which allows a visitor to customize a CGI version of the car.
The trick is to create an ad so compelling that viewers are willing to suspend their disbelief. “You need to create a realistic environment with stylized elements,” says Masri. “You can add a live-action element to the CGI that helps the eye believe.”
Ultimately, says Stiebel, for all the cutting-edge technology, a successful CGI commercial depends on the simplest advertising lesson of all. “The execution is really, really important,” he says. “But the idea is more important than the execution.”
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