Brilliant Branded Content: The Fearless

Many years ago, an animation professor told me (and I think he is right):

Never animate characters doing sports or athletic stuff. All the drama of watching that is from watching real people and wondering if they will be able to do it. There’s nothing compelling in watching an animated character do it.

But then just LOOK at this spot!

BBC Winter Olympics – The Fearless are Here from Nexus Studios on Vimeo.

The Challenge:

• The Winter Olympics are an institution. While many people are passionately engaged in them, it’s also difficult to bring a new creative approach to such an established property
• Most conventional advertising and promotion for sporting events tries to build drama by creating rivalries. As an American, I imagine Bob Costas, year after year, showing highlights of previous competition and dramatizing the stakes in every event. But that approach is best executed in video, with highlight reels and podium shots, and creates drama based on the potential outcome of the event.
• The BBC has an established history of using animation in their Olympic ads, so additional pressure was on Nexus Studios to be even more creative, doing something that hasn’t been done before even within their medium.

The Execution:

• Instead of focusing on the drama of the outcome, the who-will-win narrative best told in video, Y&R and Nexus chose to focus on the drama of the moment, of the athlete competing against themselves. Telling a story about internal conflict opened up new possibilities for abstract and creative visualization not generally seen in Olympic ads.
• 2D animation was a bold choice and, I think, the right one. Not only does it create the opportunity for a striking, graphic style and the creative freedom to depart from reality, but it also (wisely) avoids the uncanny valley we can see in other BBC Olympic ads executed in 3D.
• The spot has excellent craftsmanship in every frame. The music is perfect; married brilliantly with the visuals and building tension and drama throughout the spot. Working in an abstracted, 2D world allows for rich and powerful visual metaphors: time and speed become smoke and monsters, goals and risk become action lines and dynamic shapes… the freedom to play with and transform shape and scale makes the spot incredibly dynamic. And LOVE that VR camera! It’s the camera that is a technical tour-de-force here, because the choice of 2D as a medium can often limit camera decisions. In this spot, the camera is as free as the characters are, and gives a performance of its own.

The Results:

Everyone is talking about this spot, and it’s abuzz in the ad industry, and it has definitely raised the bar for subsequent BBC Olympic ads.

Of course, I would love to know if the ad creates new opportunities for Nexus and directors Smith & Foulkes. A project like this is a great way to prove technical expertise and creative excellence, and it’s a very smart way to leverage their work in AR and VR to show how those capabilities enhance a traditional creative.

Bonus comparison:

Here are some earlier BBC Olympic adverts:

You will notice that they are all quite good, but all quite similar:

• beautiful fantasy lighting
• beautiful, outscale landscapes and scenery
• great music
• they all have the same timing: they do a slow build (in story, music, edits, camera) to create drama
• they all have the very same failing that I mentioned at the top of this article: while really well-designed and well animated, the character animation simply can’t measure up to the level of engagement we would have if we saw a person. The human eye is extremely sensitive to other people, and in video footage we would notice hundreds of microexpressions, the slightest tremor of a muscle or bead of sweat, the tempo of the breath… we are biologically attuned to receive those messages and respond in kind, our own excitement generated by what we are seeing. And we can’t get that innate, human response (maybe we will someday) from animated characters.

Nexus wisely and boldly chose to abandon this path and give us a spot that is adrenaline from beginning to end, and avoided the uncanny valley mis-step in the process. Really fantastic work.