to niche advertisers

Sylvain Taillon

Producer, TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation

From where we’re standing, I think tv advertising will stay.

The problem for advertisers is where do you advertise, but at the same time, the beauty of it is you can target your advertising better.

In a way, I see it as a better instrument to control who you’re talking to, and how. Some products are broad-based enough that they could advertise on any network, and if anything, there are more opportunities now that some markets are a little better targeted. There are people who would not necessarily advertise on general television, who now might get into tv.

We’ve been doing a number of projects for a company that has consumer-based North American network advertising and is also doing some that is more specific, spinoffs from the main campaign targeted towards a certain group.

If the advertiser, in terms of strategy, can find a common thread in the audience they want to target, there’s opportunities for us to custom-tailor and milk that for what it’s worth.

Working in a digital environment, we can bring in the raw ingredients of a campaign and treat it as many ways as you want. That might be an option for advertisers, in terms of animation or effects or versioning.

If anything, we’re seeing markets that we’ve never touched before. We’re doing a job out of the u.s. for a client that is doing a broad-based national network campaign and shooting a little extra stuff here and there and getting us to create a two-minute version with a different buildup for business-based clients that they can better target through niche channels.

We’re in a privileged situation working in the field of animation, special effects, digital media: we tend to be a little more at the forefront in terms of looks and style, because we’re working with what everybody’s wary of – the new technology.

We can custom-tailor our product, as we work with it, for different mediums – film, tv campaigns, or computer files.

We’ve started doing home pages for clients already. It’s a different spin, but if you’ve started a campaign you’ve got the main ingredients in terms of the basic creative message, and because our technology’s extremely flexible, it allows us to reuse elements left, right and center and package it for different markets.

As far as we’re concerned, it looks like there’s more work coming. One aspect is the markets and the other is the new technologies that are coming as well; but everything still tries to work with moving pictures. As long as pictures move we’re happyÉeven if they don’t move we’re happy too.

There seems to be – it starts in Hollywood – a lot of interest in things which you can’t really create traditionally, a lot more special effects. topix started as a 3D computer animation company and slowly we became a special effects company, because of the strength of our technology and because people were trying to blend everything they could into one final image.

Traditional animation, special effects, computer animation, blue screen techniques, compositing, we’re busier than ever because these are now the things to go for.

Who knows when the tide will turnÉbut so far so good.

For us, the big difference these days is that the technology isn’t a scary thing for a lot of people now. The kind of technology platform we started working with eight years ago is becoming a multipurpose tool for all sorts of visual treatments and effects. Also, a visual language is starting to be elaborated by people all over.

There’s a very definite interest in what we can do. So many live-action-based storyboards are calling for incredible things to happen that you can’t do in real life. People are trying to be more and more entertaining. With video games and high-end special effects, it takes a lot to surprise people.

A good traditional concept still works, but a lot of people also think that you’ve got a very sophisticated audience, and because of the image bombardment, they want to put a lot of things in front of their eyes to grab their attention.

People come to us and say, `If I’ve got a good idea or joke, once people get the concept, they won’t want to see it again.’ I think that is true, but I think that also, with a good execution, there’s still room for that.

We worked on the Nescafe (‘For Your Cafe State of Mind’) campaign last year, and I think that it was successful for a number of reasons. The (live-action) performance – the little granny (‘no cafes in Plattsville’) – and direction by Richard D’Alessio was great.

The added bonus was that it was so off-the-wall and bizarre-looking that it grabbed your attention and you wanted to look at it over and over again.

I think the visual element – the startle factor – has moved up a little in the hierarchy of importance, but not to the detriment of good ideas and a good storyline.

There’s a tremendous amount of pressure on us to do things that are amazing. In the viewer’s mind, whether they watch Jurassic Park, True Lies or a coffee commercial, they are never going to say, `This is just a commercial that cost a couple of hundred thousand and this is a movie that cost $45 million, so I should be a little more lenient towards the commercial.’

We do get a lot of over-ambitious boards, and we say, `Great, we can do it,’ because we can. The big difference is whether or not you’ve got six months and a lot of money.

We get involved a lot in those kinds of storyboards, in terms of `let’s look at a way to get a similar wow factor,’ to just do it a little more realistically.

High-end things are still expensive. Our prices have never changed all that much; we get faster machines that can achieve more, and then we get more demanding. There’s a lot of things we can achieve now that even six months ago I would say we could not do.

Things are moving out of Hollywood and into our studio; we just bought a Flame system. Some things that two years ago would have taken us six months and cost a fortune to do, we can now do in a month or two, and very convincingly. It’s getting faster, better and easier, and a little more affordable.

Because the resources we have are more elaborate, the role of the animator or the designer is becoming more and more important creatively.

Since it’s a fast-moving medium and fast-moving technology, people approach us more. Agencies still do have to go through all the testing and selling the concept to the client before they can talk to anybody, but they tend to involve us a lot earlier on. It’s also a cost consideration; people who go out there on a limb, come up with a storyboard and say, `This is what I want,’ sometimes come up with things that aren’t doable (within the budget or time frame.)

Especially with interaction, there’s a number of new components. It can get fairly elaborate. Just in terms of the programming, people who work with computers all the time are on that wavelength, and we’re going to become important in terms of how you make it work.

The rule applies in any medium: if you pick the brains of the people who are ultimately going to do it, you’ll be the richer for it.

We don’t try to take the ball and roll with it, we like to get involved with the creative team, bounce around ideas and just get crazy. They’ll take back the raw creative material we’ve spurted out together and look at the advertising parameters and try to incorporate it. We’re seeing that happening a lot.

It’s exciting, but a good idea is still the main ingredient, somewhere in the mix.