Galaxy S8 Times Square Takeover
Director
Over 40 different screens, thousands of megapixels, and a couple giant whales.
When The Studio was approached with the task of taking over nearly every digital billboard in times square with Samsung’s latest visual, a giant whale, I was immediately struck by the vision of a times square awash in slowly moving whales and undulating blue light. By creating a slow moving, infinitely looped underwater oasis we were able to transform the “intersection of the world” (or, hell) into a tranquil seascape for several hours. A true career highlight!
Awards
Cannes - Bronze Lion - Video / Moving Images | Design
LIA - Bronze - Motion Graphics - Animation | Design
D&AD - Wood Pencil - Spatial Design / Installation Design
Art Directors Club - Shortlist - Direct
Art Directors Club - Merit - Innovation / Experiential Design
Taking Over Times Square
To start, we knew that we needed a way to properly visualize and sync the multiple blocks worth of billboards. This meant a painstaking process of recreating our billboards in a true-to-scale CG model.
Once we had the billboards in 3D, it was time to start animating our whale and diver.
The dramatically different scale and placements of the boards meant we had to compensate for speed as the whales were “crossing streets” or traveling upward, then immediately laterally.
Animation renders were then mapped to the virtual billboards and rendered out in 360 video (subsequently, we replaced this with a real-time rendering VR approach, which was much more efficient). Finally, in a VR headset, we were able to grasp the scale and speed of the whale, and made appropriate adjustments.
To review renders, we built a system that would take the output for each board, and compile it into several views so that we could see how all the renders would look when played next to each other.
