Longtail dreams big with Sandbox for Lotterywest
Lotterywest has aired their latest campaign created by indie agency Longtail and Post Production house Sandbox.
The ‘Dream a little this Saturday’ TVC campaign involved the creation of a magical lotto dream universe full of what someone could do with a million dollars.
The campaign consisted of 1 x 30-second and 3 x 15-second cut-down versions.
Longtail’s Josh Edge and Tyson Knowles came to Sandbox with the brief that players were using their winnings to do “something better with their lives” rather than just material gain. The initial idea for the campaign began with thinking how the dreams could be individualised.
“Great credit to Longtail, Josh, Tyson, Rikki Burns, Samantha Campbell and the team at Longtail,” said said Grady Habib, Managing Director at Sandbox. “It was a very different style and concept to the type of lottery ads we have historically seen, the result… well, I’ll let you be the judge.”
The premise that each dream could only be seen from one perspective assisted the collaborative process between Longtail and Sandbox. The creatives decided to create a universe where you flew through players’ dreams. The dreams would appear to be stars until the camera reached the optimum position, revealing the dream. Each dream is a pre-generated cluster of about 300,000 particles. Artist and Visual Effect Supervisor at Sandbox, Jaemie Manners, then projected dream imagery onto those particles.
“When the camera lines up with the dream in the exact angle the image is revealed but if the camera is just slightly misaligned the images look like a bunch of particles,” said Manners. “This was the simple part; the challenging aspect was putting multiple dreams into a 360° environment whilst maintaining constant movement to give the effect of travelling through space. If a few pixels were moved too far you’d be unable to make out the dream.”
The second stage of the process was compositing, giving the 3D rendered images the colour and glow of the final product (pic left shows a ‘before’ shot). Rendering the 3D passes, then compositing and creating the look afterwards meant that changes such as depth of field, colours or glows could be done quickly with the client in the room. Render time would take only 30-minutes rather than several hours, enabling greater creative flexibility.
“Having that flexibility in our work is something that I know I strive to do. It leaves me more time to play with different ideas and concepts rather than waiting around twiddling my thumbs wondering what YouTube video of Ali G to watch,” said Manners.
Soundbyte Studios created the sound design for the campaign. Soundbyte’s Brad Habib said it began with casting.
“We needed the perfect, gentle, ethereal voice over for the dream universe and Naomi Smith fitted the brief perfectly. The hunt for music began with a library track, then a composed track and finally the original track California by Grimes was selected.”
“The sound design included real slices of live sounds and ambient sound design elements but when it came time to mix we felt that less is more on this job, so we pulled everything back and let the music do the work.”
Sandbox and Longtail engaged in a highly collaborative approach to the project, resulting in a great campaign and a very happy client.
“There was a nice mutual respect from both sides and it was a real pleasure working with Longtail,” said Manners.
Grady Habib said it was the kind of project they want to do more of.
“Sandbox was named ‘Sandbox’ because we want people to bring their preliminary ideas to us and we can all sit in the same sandpit developing the ideas further. This project was a great example of that. The team and I look forward to being involved in more projects earlier in their life cycle.”
Credits
Client: Lotterywest
Agency: Longtail
Post-production: Sandbox Post Productions
Visual Effects Supervisor / Artist: Jaemie Manners
Sound Designer: Brad Habib, Soundbyte Studios
Post‐Producer: Jenny Crabb
3 Comments
Ahhh… thanks for all your help on this, Grady and co. You’re good people!
So what is MF doing if not the TV and digital?
Super happy with the result. Was great seeing this one through from start to finish and working with Sandbox & co. has been awesome 🙂