We give data a real-world context. Sometimes that means creating accurately measured objects with computer graphics, to give a sense of scale. Sometimes it means placing 3D representations of data in real-world footage. Sometimes it's both.
This video was made for Project Everyone who wanted to raise the issue of plastic in our oceans with an audience at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2018. We came up with the idea of using plastic ducks to represent the plastic pollution but wanted to engage the actual audience first seeing the film. So we found drone footage of Cannes and then segued into the CGI scene. More info here
It is not easy to make invisible things visible. Our approach is to keep things simple, to ensure our audience knows what they are looking at and why. The usual way we keep things simple is called ‘Diagram Land’, which is a magical computer-generated space in which everything scales perfectly.
In Diagram Land everything in the picture is either data or something that provides a physical context for data. For instance, there may be nothing in the picture except a floor, a volume containing a quantity of carbon dioxide gas and a well-chosen building. The Empire State Building may work well for a New York audience and the Houses of Parliament may work for a UK audience.
Sometimes our work requires a specific place or location. Library footage can be an option, but camera moves are actually a very important part of the visualisation toolkit. We can communicate a great deal about the scale of a number, or how it compares to another number by moving around the scene, so sometimes we need our own drone footage for real world simplicity. For this project we commissioned drone specialist Ed Smit of Herenow.film to take drone footage of two solar farms in Devon so that we could overlay CGI carbon savings. More info here
Another example was the launch of a Bristol Waste recycling project. The company were sponsors of a Solar Balloon at the International Balloon Fiesta in August 2016 which took place at the Ashton Court estate on the edge of Bristol. So we decided to commission drone aerial photography of the estate as the background scene, rather than using a computer generated background. More info here
Finally, it can help the story to start a video piece with real ‘stuff’ then segue to an abstract graph to show more complex detail. This extract was part of a film made for UNEP to convey the scale and complexity of resource use in the Asia Pacific region at a conference of Environment Ministers and subsequently to other audiences. More here
If you have a comms challenge where you think live action footage could combine with CGI graphics do get in touch.