Visuals for ITV Studios’ drama upfronts 2018 presentation in Victoria House.

At the beginning of every year ITV Studios host an industry event to preview their upcoming and returning shows to content buyers, investors and members of the industry. This year they decided to do things very differently by organizing the first Drama Festival - a labirynth of rooms each dressed up to represent their key shows, with the centerpiece being a room with 7 projectors that turned it’s three walls into giant screens for an immersive audiovisual experience.

Zealot were trusted to deliver the audiovisual creative for the event with me being in charge of delivering the motion graphics part of it all.

The job consisted of two parts - creating the concept and motion graphics for the opening of the event that would lead into a showreel choreographed across the three walls and creating the look and all the assets for the four following sessions presenting ITV’s key shows.

The canvas we were working with was a front wall of 15x3m and two side walls of 8x3m each, resulting in a 10600x1200px frame.
Our approach was to identify the unique things about this setup compared to a more conventional one and make use of them to create a fresh experience for the audience.

The client wanted our design to compliment the look of the print and production design materials already created for the event that had a clean, minimal 2D vector look based on rectangular shapes and lines. We wanted to make the most out of the fact that our audience would be encompassed by the screens, so we went with the idea of bringing their existing look into 3D space and playing with the illusion of depth as the cornerstone of the design - the walls would be made out of simple geometric shapes and would “move back” and “come closer”. This was achieved by creating all the 3D animations in a virtual room, built to the scale of the real one and captured through cameras from the height of a seated position to account for the average viewers’ perspective.

The guests would arrive at the location and would be lead through a narrow hallway to basement level where the event took place. They would enter a large, dark room filled with about 200 chairs, probably expecting to watch content on a single screen as they would have done a bunch of times in the past years.

We decided to play with this expectation and use it to grab the viewers’ attention and interest from the very first seconds of the event - the show would start with a 16x9 frame on the front wall that would then have graphical elements come outside the frame, creating an unexpected surprise, and the screen area would start growing to fill the whole of the 15m long front wall, to then start creeping onto the side walls, revealing that the whole room is an active screen.

The event was structured in four panel sessions, for each of which we created it’s own look to set the mood and represent the visual indentity of the show that was being presented.

Each session consisted of several parts, going between people talking and Q&A-ing on stage to playing clips from the shows, which meant we had to create an asset package that included holding screens and transitions that could be triggered by the stage manager to transition between them seamlessly.

All the compositing of key art and client content was done in After Effects by exporting a UWM material pass from C4D and using a UV map to map images on the surfaces of geometry. This way the project was able to stay quite live and flexible for last minute client changes.