2023 marks a big year for Timberland as the company turns 50 years old.

In around August last year, we were approached by our friends at Kinc a spectacular communications agency, to see if we could help them produce something special and experiential for an internal Timberland company event.

They wanted to build on their prior success in the Metaverse but also needed to give a live presentation and catwalk show. The audience was predominantly internal teams with a few select external parties invited and the event was to take place in the incredible Sky Garden.

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Our challenge was to tell the story of Timberland’s history in a genuinely engaging way and blur the digital and physical lines with talking avatars of the four division heads from the company.

To add another element of complication, this video would be shown onto huge portrait screens, split left and right of a cat walk which gave us the opportunity to play with two cameras, showing different elements of the scene simultaneously all the way through the presentation.

Oh, and we had eight weeks to finish it.

As an aside, the more I learnt about Timberland during this time the more impressed I was with an ethos of quality products and giving back to the community that runs way beyond skin deep. It is really nice to see a large profit machine like that genuinely care about leaving things better than they found them on the way.

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We broke the project down into three core tracks.

The first was the 3-D creative world and journey.

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The second was filming the pre-recorded elements of the presentation with the division heads in Switzerland.

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The third was to turn those filmed elements into an animated avatar that we could place within the world.

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The storyboard is broken into past, present, and future.

Going back to where the company began explored the foundation of all the initiatives that they currently run and gave a sense of pride in the company.

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The present was doing a live presentation on the stage where the four division head avatars became real people who then gave their talk about the current and upcoming campaigns. For this we created animated backdrops, think of it like a powerpoint on steroids, to give meaning to their talks.

Then finally we looked into what the future might hold for Timberland, for its community and for its products.

What resulted was a piece of work that stood out has been the thing I’m most proud of creating with the team in 2022. It was visually stunning, built a cohesive journey and captured the audience.

For those interested in the tech we needed to deploy this then read on:

Most of the sequence was built in UE5 because it retained the flexibility to make camera adjustments and re-render sequences time and again at speed. This did mean a little more time modelling and creating the worlds but once complete the scenes were stunning and had the game-like look we wanted for the avatar aesthetic.

We worked with DeepMotion to convert the live filmed footage into skeletal tracking for the avatar’s and took Ready Player Me avatars then customized them to quickly give us a base to work from.

For specific transitional elements we built them out in after effects and composited the entire sequence in after effects before grading and eventually used premier for the final cut with audio and the completed mix.

We recorded voice-over in-house with our studio set up.

If you would like to know any more about this project or just want to realise a wild idea for your next marketing project please get in touch.

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