Creative collective Tronic Studio, drew on its architecture expertise in designing a freestanding outdoor LED display for Oracle OpenWorld 2008, the world's largest gathering of Oracle customers, partners, developers and technology enthusiasts. They were also tapped by Oracle to direct and animate all the branded content for the event, which included one: 30 spot and one: 60. The conference, held September 21-25 at San Francisco's Moscone Center, drew some 43,000 attendees.
"Oracle OpenWorld was the latest example of the strong branded content work we've done for clients like Sony, Hitachi, Target and others," notes Vivian Rosenthal who co-founded Tronic with Jesse Seppi. "Oracle didn't want a typically corporate feel for its large-scale outdoor LED at Fourth and Howard Streets. They wanted something that would engage conference attendees as well as pedestrian traffic, something that would make people stop and think about what Oracle does."
Based on Oracle's tag line, "Connect. Collaborate. Learn," Tronic developed a pair of CG and live-action spots, which ran in a loop on the big screen. Using the software developer's signature red and white color palette, Tronic took viewers inside Oracle to a CG world where, within the Oracle matrix, people connect, collaborate and learn.
From New York City, Tronic directed an HD studio shoot, where talent was choreographed against greenscreen, and an HD exterior shoot in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. "The greenscreen shoot was "very intricate," Seppi recalls, with multiple actors tightly choreographed to a highly-finished animatic we which had created in order to use as reference."
A Dialogue Between Body and Technology
"Since Oracle's logo is based around the square we felt it was the right language to bring to life," Seppi says. In the first spot, with their heads replaced by an abstracted, square-framed form of the logo, Oracle users are depicted navigating an interactive landscape of moving architecture, which respond to their movements and vice versa.
"It's a dialogue between the human body and the transformative properties of technology and how that enables change," Rosenthal explains. "We wanted to give a sense of a world where each piece of the landscape is interconnected; when something shifts and transforms it affects all of the other pieces, so there's an exploratory feeling in the actors' movements."
In Oracle's CG world interlocking red and white frames tumble in front of a man to form a path leading to another man who rises up to its level on a red beam. Suddenly joined on the same level -they Connect. When one of the men grabs a trail of floating white forms it links that data stream from his head to his colleague's -they Collaborate. And, as more men and women appear in the landscape, constantly keeping pace with moving, interlocking steps -the group Learns. Symbolically the spot shows how Oracle's technology is allowing its customers to work together in new ways.
Live Action + CG = Real-Life
Tronic took a different approach to combining live-action with CG in the second spot where an actor takes the lessons of Oracle's CG world and applies it to real-life situations. "We devised a visual metaphor for a future where software applications create a global, connected network," says Rosenthal. "Here's a guy tapping into the software from many places at once. It's always present and accessible. It's built into the world around you."
In addition to directing the live-action shoots, Tronic crafted all of the CG animation and performed painstaking tracking, keying and compositing to unite CG and live elements. Finally, Tronic designed the LED screen, which was mounted in a vertical orientation, and had steps leading up to the bottom of the screen, where content sometimes spilled out of the screen and over the steps to the ground. Other branding content, also created by Tronic, played across the LED display too.
Expanding the Brandscape...
Oracle OpenWorld's proximity to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art gave added impetus to Tronic's decision to "apply a more contemporary design approach to branding," Rosenthal says. "We brought a rigorous design sensibility to the project. More and more brands are beginning to understand that design is critical to their success. Oracle was willing to let us take risks, to be creative and artistic while capturing their message."
Oracle was so pleased with the results that the company plans to repurpose the spots for other events around the globe. "It was a departure for them, but it evoked the brand's core messages while being broader and more artistic in scope," Rosenthal concludes.