Phillips 66 "Welcome to Lower Visco City"
This project came through our agency partners Bailey Lauerman and Sally Mars. Phillips 66 needed visual assets for an upcoming campaign promoting their lower viscosity engine oil. They asked us to develop controllable, customizable graphics for vehicle wraps and billboards.
Phillips 66 would also use these still images on their website, in print ads, and for trade shows. So, these assets needed to be incredibly high-resolution and scalable to fit all those needs. Bailey Lauerman gave us detailed storyboards with specific camera angles and timing for voice-overs.
The FUSE team took those concepts and brought them to life.
The Challenge
The project presented an immediate challenge: they needed the work done fast. The client even prefaced their request with concern about how quickly they were asking us to turnaround assets for this Phillips 66 campaign.
Given the magnitude of the project, it was imperative we meet that tight deadline.
The goal was to work as efficiently as possible to get the project done, and our team nailed it. In fact, we exceeded the client’s expectations and target goals by delivering scalable campaign assets earlier than expected.
Bringing the Concept to Life
The scene needed to look as real as possible, from the metallic vehicles to the sunlight over the city. With such a tight deadline, the team worked together to optimize the process and tackle the biggest obstacles first.
Large-scale lighting was one of many challenges project lead Zak Katara tackled here. The CGI city is several kilometers long. He needed to perfectly light that space while paying attention to other details like cloud direction. The result is incredibly accurate, realistic natural light.
While Zak tackled the primary animation and set design, along with most of the post work, he also enlisted the help of the entire team.
Senior rendering specialist Levi Krippner worked on textures. Specifically, he created realistic textures for the truck and van. To bring another layer of realism to the animation, technical specialist Shawn Letendre focused on the secondary motion and rigged the vehicle’s suspension movements. Artist Rachel Buchen helped smooth out the camera movements.
These details really brought the campaign to life. All this work resulted in incredibly realistic and scalable visual assets. Our 3D rendering work looks amazing at any size – from small website graphics to huge images on billboards or semi-trucks.
The Result
Our talented team took Bailey Lauerman’s storyboards and translated their ideas into a fully developed set of scalable visual assets for Phillips 66’s campaign.
Despite our client’s initial concerns about the tight deadline, we delivered beautiful, photorealistic images and an animation ahead of schedule.
Getting this project completed early meant they could launch this new campaign even faster than they imagined. Bailey Lauerman’s team wouldn’t have any additional work resizing or adjusting the stills, because our animation matches it perfectly.
Projects like this just can’t be done without 3D rendering. It would have been next to impossible to set up a film or photo shoot to capture the same movement, angles, and lighting. Even better, these visual assets are entirely customizable and adjustable. If Phillips 66 launches a new campaign later this year, we can just as quickly update these campaign graphics to match.
We received an honorable mention in the 2018 London International Creative Competition in the professional Web Design category. Our Phillips 66 campaign project received this award in a contest of thousands of qualified entries from around the world.
