Project overview
The latest range of BRAVIA TVs from Sony showcase ‘Monolithic Design’ - a new design thinking in which minimalism is coupled with a human focus to create products with a radically new look and feel.
Sony’s new Monolithic Design BRAVIA TVs look amazing even before they’re turned on, and are aimed at transforming the space around them. With Sony committed to this radical new approach, we suggested creating an interactive concept piece for the BRAVIA website to communicate the thinking behind – and the principles of – Monolithic Design.
Our brief was to get into the minds of Sony’s product designers – and to describe the essence of their thinking to a wider audience.
The challenges
Consumer electronics communication pieces are normally features-led, but in this case the subject itself dictated a stripped back, almost ambient piece. Instead of talking about LED screen technologies and High Definition displays, we’d be discussing philosophy and aesthetics. We also needed to show just how good-looking the new BRAVIA TVs really are.
In other words, we would be working in a space normally dominated by hugely expensive TV ad shoots featuring big name directors, large film crews and giant budgets (none of which were in our scope).
What’s more, our finished film piece needed to work both as part of an interactive web page and as a standalone, in-store display.
The studio in Commercial Street is transformed
Taking reference shots at 2 in the morning...
What we did
Rather than take the obvious route suggested by the subject matter (Japanese minimalism = zen gardens and bamboo), we developed a concept that took its visual cues from modern European architecture. Our idea was to set the film piece in a building reduced to its essentials, playing with contrasting textures like glass and concrete to invoke a calm, graceful, modern tone. By placing the Monolithic Design TV within this type of ‘monolithic environment’, the two design styles would complement each other, reinforcing the concept.
We decided to use CGI to create the majority of the piece, as this would allow us to build and completely control our ideal filming environment.
CGI meant that if we decided we wanted to shift our location to the southern hemisphere in June, or get the light of a Scandinavian winter, we could.
However, this approach came with its own challenges. Because the concept required unmatched realism, we had to design a new way to create hyper-realistic computer generated imagery. There was also the issue of processing: with more raw computing power required for the 3D rendering than was available in the Hugo & Cat offices, we had to use cloud computing: farming the processing out to available computers across the internet.
And since the captions on the final video piece were to be translated into 47 languages and we wanted to keep control of how the on-screen text would look in each version, we also needed to develop a technology allowing us to make integrated captions, which could be translated “on the fly”.
The results
We made two cuts of the finished film – one for presentation as a standalone introduction to Monolithic Design, and one to be part of an interactive experience for the BRAVIA website. Sony told us that the finished piece “embodies and explains the Monolithic Design ethos perfectly. Its sense of space, use of beautiful contrasting materials and focus on how the BRAVIA transforms a room, shows just how Monolithic Design can complement your room interior.”
The film was used as part of Sony’s installation at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan, the world’s largest product design fair, where it received a very positive response. It has also been posted to Sony Europe’s official YouTube channel.
“We’ve been thrilled with the reaction at Salone in Milan. People were stopped in their tracks by its pace and presentation. It provided a seamless introduction to the beauty of the Sony products we had on show.”
Online Marketing Manager, Sony TV Europe