Most political TV commercials are pretty straightforward. We make plenty. You know the style: news and campaign (or stock) footage plus voiceover (often from the candidate) and some clean motion graphics. This is the tried-and-true political TV ad style. They're relatively inexpensive to make. Plus we can make them pretty fast, so campaigns can address fast-moving targets.
This particular political TV commercial is not like that.
Relation Agency is into big ideas. This one was based around calling out the false promises politicians make and pushing New York’s voters to see through them, realize their own power, and get involved. The campaign was called “I Promise”. It was high-concept and unlike any political commercial we’d ever seen. The first half of the story was a fantasy sequence with three different mayors standing on the steps of New York City Hall on Inauguration Day, making promises.
The twist was, instead of hearing the typical false promises we’ve all heard before, we’d get the truth.
We love big ideas, too. The thing was, there were a lot of things we’d have to figure out to make “I Promise” happen on time and on budget.
The biggest hurdle was location. There was no way New York would let us film on the steps of City Hall. Also, the budget couldn’t cover the huge production design needed to make City Hall look like it does during a mayoral inauguration- you know, the flags, the stage, the pomp and circumstance.
But we had an ace in the hole: Virtual Production. Virtual Production is the greatest thing to hit our industry in decades. It’s the production design driver of Disney’s “Mandalorian” series, and it’s being used on tons of big feature films to create impossible worlds and bypass the typically very long post-production process. We knew Virtual Production was the only way we could possibly create this story.
First, we dove into VP to create detailed pre-visualization and animatics. The kind of things that political ads typically don’t have the time or the money to create. We knew we’d need this to help sell the idea of using Virtual Production to the end client. We began in Maya, our 3D program of choice, then imported it into Unreal Engine to create cinematics, using its real-time rendering engine to help us quickly try out different shot ideas.
Then we went to work building the final primary set: City Hall during a mayoral inauguration. We started with two scouting and photo capture trips to New York City Hall. We used this work for camera projections and 3D textures for the final scenes, along with publicly-available information and building specifications.
We arrived at the Los Angeles soundstage armed with a deep knowledge of the details so we could concentrate on actor performances and the big idea. Once filming was complete, post-production went very smoothly thanks to our Virtual Production pipeline.
In the end, for the price of one commercial we had a half dozen variations of “I Promise”, allowing Relation to target specific voters based on their hot-button issues.