Re-animating reality: How animation can help draw a new future for advertising

Mid-pandemic, an arresting little app appeared on social media, one that re-animated old family photos so that long-departed family members came blinking and nodding back to life on your smartphone in an uncannily persuasive digital resurrection.

MyHeritage’s Deep Nostalgia app delivered a highly personalised kind of animation, a hybrid of deep fake, deep learning and manipulated reality. This at a time when much human interaction relocated to shared screens and video calls, and across the media landscape, live-action shoots were suspended through successive lockdowns. 

[Animation has] always been the beautiful underdog of creative storytelling in advertising – we don’t have a comic book culture like in France, Japan or the US – we have Bagpuss.

Almost by default, animation had the opportunity to come to the forefront and seize the day as the primary medium to tell stories and deliver messages for brands, not just in 30-second TVCs, but across the board, fusing 2D and 3D with live-action, stop-motion and VFX to deliver worlds and ways of telling stories that rose above and beyond what we may have come to expect. 

As Barney Richard of boutique creative studio Friends Electric says of animation’s status in the UK before the pandemic hit: “It’s always been the beautiful underdog of creative storytelling in advertising – we don’t have a comic book culture like in France, Japan or the US – we have Bagpuss. But lockdown has definitely shone a light on animation and mixed media and different ways of thinking, different ways of solving creative problems.” 

Above: Rather than a comic book culture, the UK used animation, the "beautiful underdog of storytelling", to create characters like Bagpuss. 

For Partizan’s Executive Producer, Duncan Gaman, “Anything that makes people consider animation is a good thing, and there was a massive influx of brands and agencies testing the water and seeing if it was viable, and things overall have been a lot busier. The world of motion meeting illustration had a moment during lockdown, and illustration-led animation had an uplift, too, with work full of craft and charm. The mixed media approach of seamless integration of 2D and 3D was already happening, and perhaps lockdown accelerated it.” 

Not all those initial approaches held water. Founder of Not To Scale, Dan O’Rourke, identifies three waves of engagement between brands and animators. “In the first wave, we received a deluge of live-action scripts that people asked us to animate instead, and unintentionally we became a free consultancy service, making creative suggestions to films and projects that ended up being cancelled.” 

I’m not quite saying we deserve people out in the streets clapping for animation studios, but it’s certainly been one helluva year.

The second wave saw brands and agencies tuning in to the native potential of animation, albeit often attached to live-action timelines and budgets. “We had to pick through the most viable and relevant opportunities,” says O’Rourke. “And then the third wave coincided with the confidence brands found in the run-up to Christmas, with creatives and clients having picked up more animation experience.” That proved to be the case with Not to Scale’s work on the seasonal John Lewis Christmas campaign with adam&eveDDB and Oscar Hudson at Pulse Films, a TVC O’Rourke describes as “in many ways, more ambitious and technically challenging than ever before”.

As for a fourth wave? “I’d say the mad dash has now become a steady march. I’m not quite saying we deserve people out in the streets clapping for animation studios, but it’s certainly been one helluva year.”

Above: John Lewis fused a variety of animation styles in its 2020 Christmas campaign.

For Mike Moloney, Founder and ECD at Art&Graft, the collapse of live-action work kicked open the doors of perception in terms of realising what animation could do. “A lot of clients and agencies have had their eyes opened to the effectiveness, flexibility and ambition of animation,” he says, “with many venturing into it for the first time. And I hope that will have a lasting effect. Animation offered more certainty for clients who knew that disruption was unlikely, but it also offered creativity – a medium where anything could happen, full of possibilities, a creativity without limits. Clients found that exciting in a year when live shoots were often characterised by what you couldn't do.”

[Animation] offered creativity – a medium where anything could happen, full of possibilities, a creativity without limits.

For Lautaro Brunatti in Buenos Aires, where he heads up the 1stAveMachine offices, lockdown has facilitated a creative globalisation; indeed, it more or less blew the doors off. “The opportunities were blown wide open,” he says, “With the pandemic, the frontiers have been totally erased, everyone is working everywhere, and we’re all super-busy, and we’re doing really well.” Like many others, he and 1stAveMachine were inundated with live-action briefs that fell at the first post. “Now we are getting ideas that are well thought out for animation rather than being forced. I think that will continue,” says Brunatti, pointing to their recent work mixing animation and live-action replay for ESPN’s One App, One Tap campaign.

Above: ESPN's One App One Tap campaign mixed animation and live-action. 

But as Kerry Smart, MD of 1StAveMachine in London, points out, the pandemic is influencing the future not only in terms of animations uplift, but in its – and the wider industry’s – sustainability. “I’m getting scripts that state we don’t want the director to travel, we don’t want to do any air miles, and that is coming from the brands. If they’re saying that, the answer is, let’s look at a digital or animation route. There’s a lot of talk about whether we’ll go back to the way things were, and I really hope that we don’t,” she adds. “I come from live-action background, and I hope there will be a really nice balance of the two, that animation will be a part of things, rather than an add-on or bonus benefit, and that we continue to see scripts written solely for animation.”

I’m getting scripts that state we don’t want the director to travel, we don’t want to do any air miles, and that is coming from the brands.

Sustainability and a broader diversity in terms of talent and execution are twin drivers of content in animation, says Steve Smith, director, producer and founder of Beakus. “Beakus always worked remotely with talent – it's something integral to having a small studio striving for the best talent and biggest influence,” he says, “but it's finally sunk in that offsetting carbon is not enough; we need to reduce emissions, and animation, and VFX, can clearly help facilitate this with virtual environments, green screen and the like. I think deep fake will become a serious issue soon, and real-time rendering with game engines like Unity will revolutionise 3D and 2D work across our industry.” 

And while he’s working on a new animation series for TV that’s pledged to draw a fifth of its crew from diverse cultural backgrounds, the enthusiasm for levelling up throughout the industry has formidable roadblocks. “Whatever the reasons for it, there is a lack of diversity in the talent pool, in all areas of production,” he says, “and that makes hiring hard, so I spend a lot of time sourcing talent. It feels like we're on the foothills of a big mountain,” he adds. “But better to be there than in the valley.” 

Above: The democratisation of technology allows people access to the same tools used by major studios like Marvel.  

For Sam Gray, Head of Business Development at animation studio Strange Beast, levelling up is about the democratisation of the cutting-edge tools that have come through the gaming industry, which itself has had a boom time through the pandemic, and is a vast, ever-evolving territory for animators. “You can’t ignore the impact of real-time engines like Unity and Unreal on animation, VFX and virtual production,” he says. “It’s the direction of travel.” 

He points to Unreal’s MetaHuman Creator cloud app that empowers anyone to create photorealistic digital humans using its Unreal Engine to render complex digital worlds in real time. “It’s democratising those super-high-end tools and techniques so that everyone can use them. Unreal’s tools used to be £50k for a licence, and they’re now free. So someone in their bedroom can make a CG feature film with the same tools used on the Marvel movies, and we can work with animators all around the world and have access to all these different people we wouldn’t have previously been able to consider.”

You can’t ignore the impact of real-time engines like Unity and Unreal on animation, VFX and virtual production.

Not everyone sees Unreal’s engine as good fit in animation’s commercial arena, however. “Most commercial studios don’t have the established pipeline or artist database to work with that software yet,” says Not to Scale's O’Rourke. “New characters or worlds still need to be built from scratch and with a bespoke look for a brand each time, rather than something a gaming engine can keep churning out.”