Written by Andrew Park, Executive Creative Director at Team ITG, part of Inspired Thinking Group

All great marketing starts with a brilliant idea – finding new, ever more creative ways to entertain and communicate with your customers. It’s busy out there and while the best idea usually wins, it isn’t always easy to produce.

Virtual Production puts creativity in the driving seat by offering a new, more efficient way to deliver the dynamic, engaging film and photography content that your customers demand. It means you can be “on-location” anywhere in the world without leaving the studio – negating the intensive travel and production difficulties associated with traditional location shoots.

Taking Control With Virtual Production

“We just didn’t have the right location”, “it was supposed to be sunny… but it wasn’t”, “the wind played havoc with our sound set up”. There is almost an infinite number of reasons why something may not land in quite the way it was planned, and perceived creative excellence is always seemingly quashed by a variety of factors, all beyond control.

These classic production excuses are now confined to the past.

Virtual Production enables marketers to create deep, multi-layered CG environments and shoot them from within a studio. It means creatives can go where they like, shoot what they like, when they like and how they like, all without the logistical headaches that would usually be involved if these were traditional location, or multi-location, shoots.

Creatives are finally able to take full control of shoots, removing the limitations of the physical world by building their reality and then shooting it. They can be closer to the output because they are literally controlling it.

The variables such as location, time of day, weather (and more) that hamper even the most tightly managed shoot no longer apply. The stories that can be told are as much about the environments they are told in as they are the concepts that deliver them and, with Virtual Production, those environments can be crafted from scratch, pixel by pixel.

Limitless Creativity

The only real limit to what a creative can do with Virtual Production is their imagination.

It is also worth confronting the “yeah, but it’s fake” narrative head-on. Virtual Production isn’t about creating documentaries. In a world of advertising, everything that is created, by definition, has an element of fakery to it. 

The crucial part is creating engaging content.

That is the core of the Virtual Production silver bullet. Creatives have nowhere to hide as real-word production excuses no longer apply. There are no boundaries aside from a marketer’s creativity.

Virtual Production forces marketers to ‘level up’ their creativity, from concept through to execution. Every time a new campaign brief comes in, the creative canvas is limitless.

With this new silver bullet, previously unrealistic ideas are no longer out of reach, out of timeframe, or out of budget. 

Bringing Ideas To Life 

If creatives want to shoot the splendour of a Greek temple on the side of an Alpine mountain without dragging equipment thousands of miles, travelling on a plane and other transport, they can – without the risk of being stifled by the weather when they get there. If they want to capture the realism of an orbiting space station without weeks of post-production, they can.

Household brands such as Jaegar have already showcased the magic of Virtual Production to set their campaigns apart.

Last year, they filmed a ‘British Road Trip’ themed campaign through Virtual Production to launch their new summer range. To capture the British summertime, creatives at ITG’s Capture Studios created four eye-catching scenes to take the audience on an authentic summer journey.

The scenes consisted of a picturesque beach, the British countryside, a traditional garden party, and a London mews street, replicating the sights and sounds of the British summer for the launch of Jaeger’s new clothing range.

Another example of a creative Virtual Production campaign at Capture was the recent launch of British musician and television presenter Myleene Klass’ new book, They Don’t Teach You This at School.

The promotional film follows Myleene on a journey through increasingly fantastic scenes while she delivers a monologue about her approach to life. The journey begins in a celebrity jungle before transitioning into a fashion studio, a Greek temple and then outer space.

Not only does this open up a whole new world of creativity, but it also comes with the added benefits of driving greater shoot efficiency, as well as reducing carbon emissions.

Virtual Production is more than brands and agencies creating a specific environment to promote something – it’s about taking the audience on a journey that truly brings their story to life.