DOOH Marketing & Installations

Grizzle has spent over ten years producing motion graphic content for almost every conceivable platform, from handheld devices to entire buildings — and in that time, we’ve picked up a few useful lessons.

Here’s a set of case studies from the past couple of years, focusing on content for out-of-home advertising and installations: what worked, what didn’t, and what to watch out for. Because every day is a school day.

Breaking Taboos

The term “360 campaign” is one we’re now more cautious about, having effectively done a full 780° after working on two of them. The first was Channel 5’s Women’s Health campaign, ‘Breaking The Taboos’ — a brilliant TV series and podcast designed to support women by shining a light on aspects of health that can feel taboo to discuss openly.

Aiming to reach as many people as possible, the campaign ran across almost every media format imaginable: TV, online and social, bus stops, train stations, and print (including newspaper wraps and ads).

The initial project seemed relatively straightforward with us producing the early design work, before adapting and animating it for a handful of platforms, focusing mostly on typography and graphic design. However, the specific deliverables became far more granular and complicated once the client requested we cover every facet of the campaign, particularly with the introduction of print, which is its own specialism.

Lessons Learned

• Design work is fine if it’s within your skillset, but confirm early whether you’re expected to handle rollout across all platforms. It’s unusual for an animation studio to focus on print. However, we made it work, but had to learn a lot about print safety areas, colour space, and formatting.
• Spreadsheets are your friend. We had to manage over 600 deliverables, each with unique formatting requirements. Every item was logged onto a shared spreadsheet that the client could use to pre-approve assets before we produced them.

Fortunately, with the team already skilled in Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator, we got through. The experience left us better prepared when it came to the Stephen Lawrence Day Foundation. With the foundation already having a media team, we were able to concentrate our focus on design and animation for the campaign video, which you can check out here.

The 1% Pledge

“360” doesn’t just apply to campaign style. In this case, we’re talking about buildings, specifically The Torch in Doha, Qatar. COPA90 approached us to create DOOH content for Adidas in support of the Women’s World Cup, titled The 1% Pledge.

“Adorned with tens of thousands of LED lights, its distinctive shape resembles a colossal torch. With a total of 165,000 LED dots, towering at 130m, it boasts the World’s Largest External 360° Screen, recognised by Guinness World Records.”

The brief was straightforward: the FIFA World Cup ball spins around the perimeter of the tower in two halves, displaying the text “The Game Has Two Halves”, before slamming together to form the full ball in the final lock-up.

Composed almost entirely in Cinema 4D, the animation was smooth sailing. COPA90 supplied a beautiful, high-fidelity ball model along with technical specs, so we were well on track for mapping the footage across the 360° display.

Interesting Fact

The Torch’s “360°” display is technically two screens side by side, with a combined resolution of 540px × 457px. The LED dots themselves are about the size of a hockey puck.

Using intuitive mapping techniques in C4D, we created a seamless loop. When viewed flat, the ball appeared fluidly from one side of the template while disappearing on the other. Once wrapped, the two ends joined seamlessly.

How Do You Know It’s Working?

With the Torch tower over 3,000 miles away in Qatar, and the COPA90 team not on site until the day before launch, one major obstacle remained: would it actually work?

The solution was to test digitally. The Torch has a full 3D replica for testing, including the surrounding landscape, so you can preview exactly what the audience will see. With our animation mapped onto the virtual mock-up, it received instant approval — at least initially.

The hiccup came the day before the event. Adidas tested the animation on the tower and it worked perfectly. However, their head offices were located on the direct opposite side of the tower from the football stadium. This meant that while the wider audience could see the final lock-up, the client could not.

Not ideal. So we doubled it: two balls flying around, resolving simultaneously on either side of the tower. Problem solved.

Lesson learned: Even when you’ve followed the brief to the letter, always push for testing and approvals in context. You can’t account for everything, and you might just save yourself a last-minute scramble.

OMEGA

Heading into the Paris 2024 Olympics, Swiss premium watch brand OMEGA sponsored the event, launching a series of luxury interactive pop-ups.

To bring these experiences together, experiential agency Smyle brought us on board to produce content for:

• An immersive space experience in Omega House, Paris
• A swimming pool experience in Selfridges, London

OMEGA House – A Journey into Space

For the Olympics, Smyle designed a contemporary room in OMEGA House resembling the interior of a spacecraft. Our job was to create what guests saw through the windows: in Cinema 4D, we animated a fly-through of space, passing celestial bodies in our solar system.

What made it immersive was that the view on one side of the room continued seamlessly to the other, creating the illusion the room itself was moving through space. This required a clever trick with two opposing cameras in C4D, although it doubled render times.

Animation Director Freddie did an astounding job building the planets while continually adjusting the shuttle’s flight path to match the client’s vision. The final animations were displayed on LED screens recessed into the walls.

Selfridges – Swimming Pool Experience

“An immersive space mimicking the inside of a swimming pool. Customers could dive into the space while interacting with educational content highlighting OMEGA’s longstanding Olympic history.”

Picture this: right on Oxford Street, at the front of Selfridges, a moderately sized room that appears to be at the bottom of a swimming pool. The space had an entire ceiling and one full wall covered with LED displays, viewable both inside and through glass frontage onto Oxford and Duke Street.

Here’s what we had to account for when producing the content:

Perspective

The wall display had to appear as a continuation of the pool facade designed by Smyle. The illusion only worked from a specific viewing point. While the set was being built, we mocked up the entire scene in C4D using floorplans to demo the displays and flag issues. To minimise perspective warping, we digitally opened up the scene by removing the extended floor and wall.

Compositing

The early animation was entirely 3D, even the diver, sourced from TurboSquid. Miximo didn’t have any good swim animations so although we hand animated the swimmer it was later replaced when the client expressed a preference for a stock diver composited into the scene in After Effects.

The water caustics from the ceiling took a while to refine, but after much testing in C4D we found a perfect technique to refract light realistically. This animation continued seamlessly from the ceiling into the wall display, creating one fluid surface extending into the distance.

The ceiling itself was a complex LED grid that required precise measurement, especially when pool dividers initially built as props became digital elements aligned with physical displays below.

Since rendering water is notoriously slow, and the client was still refining branding requirements close to deadline, we composited the OMEGA branding directly into the pool wall in After Effects — avoiding costly re-renders.

Takeaways

• Testing saved the day (again): The ceiling and wall displays initially didn’t match due to mismatched colour space settings from the installation team. Fortunately, it was quickly resolved, though it gave us a moment of panic.
• Stay flexible: Big clients change their minds. OMEGA revised the brief several times, but Smyle managed communications brilliantly, and our team kept working up to the 11th hour to ensure everything looked premium.

The final result was stunning, and we even found time to visit. The OMEGA team were more than happy to show off the installation (although we did discover that a small glass room with two giant LED screens gets very hot in summer!).