Motion Design: Picture Perfect

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Challenge

After a contractor backed out at the 11th hour, the executive team asked Design to help them build the teaser video for its big CES initiative: “Picture Perfect,” a suite of tools and features directly embedded inside the television, leveraging artificial intelligence to improve the picture and the viewing experience automatically . The challenge was to deliver this video from start to finish in only seven days, in the last days of December.

We started by aligning the many stakeholders of this project: Engineering, Consumer Products, Marketing, Comms, Leadership. To do so, we sent everybody a design brief to fill out. By the end of the first day, we gathered and reconciled all stakeholders’ input into a single brief that we made everyone greenlit before moving forward with the storyboard. 

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Once all stakeholders had approved the design brief, we moved on to the storyboarding part of the video. From the brief, we built a super-detailed storyboard with duration, voiceover, description, and a visual approximation of the scene: this helps stakeholders react instead of brainstorm and get lost in the details.

Storyboarding at this stage is extremely important because that is where you can afford to discuss copy, visual ideas, execution, and when changes are manageable. We gathered and reconciled as many notes and feedback as possible and adapted the storyboard to answer all of them. It took us three days, from the initial brief, to land on the final storyboard approved by all stakeholders. 

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As soon as the storyboard got approved by all stakeholders, we moved on to the execution phase of the video. The final storyboard called for a total of 54 scenes: on the most complex ones, we combined complex camera movements, particle systems, generative art, and 3D models.

The visual treatment for A.I. needed to feel like “fireflies”: on four of the scenes, to make that idea happen, we used Trapcode Particular to generate a system of particles, emitting from 3D objects in the scene. We also used Plexus and Trapcode Form in other scenes to simulate the Picture Perfect image scanning process.

Once all the visuals were rendered in After Effects, we assembled the video in Premiere.
After a quick round of feedback regarding the soundtrack and the rhythm of the video, we delivered the final version, seven days later, right on time for CES. 

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Jules is incredible. I was fortunate to see him shepherd our brand into something special for the past seven years. He’s endlessly talented, and I’ve always admired his work and his dedication to making all of us proud of our brand. I’ve seen him go above and beyond, most noticeably with our PicturePerfect product video. What was supposed to be a technical OEM TV demo transformed into a hype feature that got everyone in the company excited. Our engineers couldn’t have been more proud seeing their hard work come to life.

Charly Lanusse

Chief Technology Officer, Samba TV

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