Marketing: RMG Releases New Brand Film

October 4, 2012 by Dave Haynes

RMG Networks Experience Video from Transparent House on Vimeo.

RMG Networks arguably does the best marketing in the Digital OOH space, and that owes both to allocating a healthy budget for the work and to being much more creative in what gets done.

Consider the terrific brand film (above), which RMG had done to show the venue and journey of travellers who would consistently be in front of RMG media as they move through airports and commercial jets.

The video is done by creative studio Transparent House, which like RMG has offices in San Francisco.

From the Transparent House press release:

For this project, the company’s executives commissioned TH to produce a brand film presenting a high-tech virtual world that would allow RMG’s different business partners to visualize how custom messaging appears across the company’s key networks. Envisioned as sales tool that RMG would be able to customize, the project faced many constraints, including time, as well as potentially costly production involving filming in an airplane and an airport lounge.

“We wanted something that would allow us to really customize our sales presentation, and really give people a sense of what these exciting environments are all about,” said Chuck Strottman, RMG’s VP of marketing.

“Our goal is making 3D the spectacular core of a brand’s marketing campaigns, and this project was a very exciting opportunity for us to show RMG and its partners a lot of these capabilities in a very short amount of time,” said TH principal and co-founder Denis Krylov.

The standard TH project workflow involves storyboarding, creating animatics, and handling final rendering. Using its main tools Autodesk 3ds Max, and Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, artists in TH’s San Francisco studio created quick mockups for the storyboard, then began modeling full industrial environments in 3ds Max. As part of its hyper-real style, TH also famously uses live-action photographic elements within its projects to heighten realism. For this project, TH arranged a one-day green-screen photo shoot within its affiliated, full-service video and photo studio, Transparent Space. Using the Canon 5D Mark III, TH’s principals photographed male and female models in business attire and in various poses and lighting setups. These images were then artfully placed and composited into the CG environments of the animatics and the final content.

“We are especially proud of finding creative solutions for special projects like this,” added TH principal and strategist Krista Mollion. “For example, our senior motion designer came up with the logo animation for RMG Networks which has gotten a lot of great feedback from our clients. It was his own artistic interpretation, and we feel it adds a lot of value to the presentation.”

“We had never really considered computer graphics before as a solution, but working with Transparent House was great, and this video is now among the most valuable marketing pieces we have,” concluded Strottman. “It’s extremely versatile, the quality is excellent, and it does an amazing job showcasing our media assets.”

This would have cost a bundle, but it does a nice, clean job of explaining all the bits that RMG sells and ties them all together as travel media in a way that planners and brands would “get” over the course of two minutes.

And by the way, have a look at the press release if you want to see how to fully prep a trade publication or blogger with everything they need. I spend waaaaay too much time asking PR people for photos and video. This contains all that in one place.