The Mechanics of Pitching an Agency For an Ad Contract

The most enjoyable and daunting a part of a inventive challenge is usually the start. A inventive temporary is ready earlier than you, budgetary and timeline limitations are outlined, contracts are negotiated, and the “real” problem begins: defining the inventive.

Recently, Coat of Arms took on such a problem. We pitched to a big monetary establishment of their worldwide advertising and marketing marketing campaign. The marketing campaign aimed to entertain and to teach prospects who use the establishment’s banking kiosks. Eye-catching movies had been to depict life occasions that require banking help (e.g. shopping for a house, attending faculty, getting married, retirement, and many others.) and had been to play on giant, 42” digital shows exterior their banking kiosks in malls, airports, and different business areas.

Competing towards different distributors, Coat of Arms was tasked with defining a mode, creating distinctive characters, and absolutely animating one scene from the script drafted by the shopper’s company of report, Critical Mass. The script we got outlined that…

“A futuristic glass dome house overlooks the sea. Inside a party is going on. The DJ bot switches up the music – it’s dubstep! Everyone breaks out dancing (doing the robot). The sound waves vibrate the dome and reverberate into the water, disturbing a sleeping giant robosquid. He emerges from the ocean, his beady eye fixes on the house. One tentacle suctions on the glass and whips it away like a frisbee. He reaches into the dome with another tentacle, pulls his own vinyl track out of one of his compartments and plays it. The scene ends with robot squid dancing (doing the wave with his tentacles).”

After reviewing every vendor’s inventive pitch for this script, the shopper would award the contract to the artist who had captured the fashion they most well-liked, which Critical Mass had outlined in a quick.

Preparing for the Pitch

While pitching is thrilling, it’s demanding, doesn’t include ensures, and requires an out-of-pocket funding. As with most pitches, the shopper supplied no finances for the pitch itself and no funds had been to switch till one other contract for your entire marketing campaign was awarded and negotiated.

In preparation for our pitch, we collaborated with Critical Mass (Singapore) to outline the shopper’s objectives and preferences. Using Frame.io, we uploaded inventive ideas, styleframes, and character sketches to Critical Mass for evaluate. The company supplied notes to get our inventive nearer to the banking establishment’s imaginative and prescient. Some of Critical Mass’s course included: “[The] style should be modern, sophisticated, and elegant – not childish. [Likewise,] it must have wit, humor, [and] charm…[Robots should have] emotive expressions.”

To outline their inventive objectives, Critical Mass used just a few movies for reference. In their temporary, they indicated that they favored the subtle fashion of our video entitled Project Imagine, which we created for Marriott.

They countered our video with the colourful, humorous, and dynamic McDonald’s video known as “Arch Enemies” by Leo Burnett and Buck.

Along with these video references, Critical Mass despatched some robots they favored from different artists, together with The Jetsons, Futurama, and The Iron Giant, amongst others.

In an effort to information us via their script visually, Critical Mass sketched the essential and essential scenes from their “Buying a House” script. Because the pitch was due in just a few weeks, we got the liberty to pick any section of this storyboard to design and animate.

Rough Storyboards by Critical Mass

Pre-production on the Pitch Video

With a transparent sense of what the company and shopper desired, we introduced illustrator Manuel Santos and illustrator/animator Ricardo Nilsson on board to work on character sketches. For this primary section, we explored as many divergent choices as potential internally: robots that had been glossy and fashionable, futuristic robots with extra utilitarian instruments, and retro-vintage trying robots. Here are just a few of our favourite black and white sketches from this exploratory section.

After a number of inside passes, we shared our early work with the Critical Mass workforce. They gave us some nice suggestions and particularly reiterated that they favored the comedic characters just like the Archivist, the Brain, The Sphere, and Roomb Cat. The company requested us to retain the present course and magnificence however requested that we give every character extra persona and quirky surprises. In explicit, they indicated that Bobby the robo-dog was cute however that it didn’t have sufficient character or comedic components.

With this suggestions and many new concepts, we refined the robots additional, explored colours, and added some texture. In explicit, we put a cone on the robo-dog’s head, gave him “rear” wheels, and positioned a bone simply exterior of his attain. Perhaps a bit merciless however a memorable and fascinating character absolutely.

With characters outlined for the script, refining the textures and colours grew to become the main focus. You’ll discover how Santos modified the background to a blue-green and added a texture that made the robots look extra plastic or metallic within the pictures above and beneath.

Typically, an illustrated/animated video that’s as much as one minute in size requires 4 to 6 weeks of labor. This pitch allowed solely two weeks for all belongings. So, inside days of defining the characters, animator Ricardo Nilsson started testing the characters. His first checks manipulated the “DJ.”

Next, Nilsson animated the dancing characters from the chosen scene, together with “The Archivist,” “Slim,” and “Bobby.” Finding a steadiness between inflexible robotic actions and a complicated, clean animation was tough. Nilsson labored arduous to offer every character’s movement an awkwardness that felt purposeful and a rhythmic grace for his or her distinctive dance strikes. Nilsson famous that “the most difficult thing about animating the robots [was] finding the right dancing style for each [robot’s character.] After defining what kind of moves each robot should perform, it was all about keyframing and making it look as smooth and natural as possible.”

Nilsson used After Effects and PuppetTools 3 on every character to avoid wasting time and to remain on schedule. He additionally used the Reposition Anchor Point, the AfterImpact script, that means that you can reposition the anchor level of chosen layers across the layer edges whereas maintaining the layers on the similar place within the comp window. Below you may see these rigs and anchor factors in motion inside Nilsson’s display screen seize of the obnoxious robotic, “Selfie.”

“Selfie,” one in every of Nilsson’s and our favourite satirical characters within the piece, is hilarious. He struts his stuff, poses, factors on the digicam, and snaps a shot of himself with a selfie stick that extends from his mouth. This character is exclusive, memorable, and reminds us how ridiculous we glance once we take selfies.

The Pitch Video

Take a take a look at the ultimate pitch video with “Selfie” and the remainder of the robo-dancers partying it up beneath. Big due to Shawn Wilson for the sound design.

Winning (and Losing) the Gig

To actually polish our pitch and set it other than the competitors, Coat of Arms compiled all of the stills, gifs, the video, and a few brief descriptions into one doc. We then crossed our fingers and despatched the pitch to Critical Mass. Just a few days later we received nice information! The monetary establishment had chosen our pitch and wished to proceed. But then, dah…dah…dah…the paperwork commenced. A brand new contract was negotiated, insurance coverage considerations had been addressed, after which, someplace alongside the best way, the banking establishment’s workers modified. The challenge that was green-lit was placed on maintain and in the end canceled. Very unhappy information for all of us.

This inventive may have collected mud on our “bookshelf;” as an alternative, we determined to share it with you, to not solely give the artwork an viewers but in addition to share one in every of our profitable failures. All too usually nice inventive is placed on the again burner, goes unfunded, will get canceled, or is pegged as too bold, too inventive, off-brand, off-message, not fairly proper, and the listing continues. And whereas the funding right into a pitch may be ominous, the rewards are manyfold even while you don’t “win.” With this pitch specifically, we developed our relationship with three gifted and extremely sort artists, Ricardo Nilsson, Manuel Santos, and Shawn Wilson; we walked away with a portfolio piece that stands other than the group; and we proved to ourselves that we are able to efficiently pitch.

In reality, we had been so gung-ho to get forward on this challenge, we had began on the second script in our shopper’s roster of ten earlier than we had been instructed it was canceled. As you’ll see in these boards, the story depicts a forlorn robotic who needs for a accomplice. Finally, he meets the girl-bot of his desires they usually put together to marry. See! Every nice story has a contented ending.