BMW - ABBS 2024
At the 2024 America Brand & Business Summit in Las Vegas, BMW laid out its roadmap for its exciting new era. Focusing on technology and innovation, the company’s leaders took the stage and revealed their upcoming vehicles for 2025 and 2026.
After our successful collaboration at BMW’s 5 Series Launch event a few months early, our friends at Czarnowski and Public School turned to us for help bringing the ABBS stage show to life. Their vision for the event included using motion in a significant way the first time.
Our job was to craft motion graphics and an event package that would create a more beautiful, more dynamic presentation to wow the audience.
Beyond stock configuration
By the time we were brought onto the project, the event development was in full swing. BMW, Public School, and Czarnowski had selected and approved stock imagery that would accompany each speaker. Our job was to bring this imagery to life through motion graphics that would animate as each speaker entered, as well as play in an ambient loop on the super wide screen.
This was an extremely difficult challenge. Usually, we both develop the look of the design as well as animate it. Because we are creating bespoke designs, we can develop the project files so they are optimized and can be easily used in the animation software.
The approved stock assets were flat static images. We did not have the original working files or any assets that would help with motion. We needed to recreate the imagery from scratch in 3D to match the approved assets that were already integrated into the rest of the event.
Our team spent a lot of time fine tuning 3D, lighting, and reflections, to make it look as close to the original images as possible.
Situations like these are when having talented artists on your team is invaluable.
The stage setup also presented some unique challenges. The stage had three overlapping screens, with a large gap on each side between the middle and side screens. Speakers would walk onto the stage through one of the gaps, creating a seamless viewing experience.
We had to make sure that the design was equally seamless, and that the overlapping content looked good from the extreme ends of the audience.
Super stretch screen
The other great challenge was the size and shape of the screen. We are no strangers to massive screens, but having such a large canvas put even more pressure on nailing the recreations of the stock imagery.
The need for speed
To create such large resolution motion graphics quickly, our team utilized Unreal Engine. The main benefit of Unreal was speed, as render time is a fraction of what it would be compared to Cinema 4D. Our animator Sean was also able to light everything in realtime using UE, making sure everything had the proper wow factor.
However, at the time of this project, Unreal Engine did not include motion graphics tools (which have been announced and are coming soon).
To make UE work, we had to create a few workarounds.
For more complex animations, Sean would create the sequence in Cinema 4D and then import it into Unreal. We also utilized Redshift and After Effects.
Showtime
The event took a look at BMW’s past, present, and future. For the show, we created assets for the pre-show, each speaker, and the finale.
Here is a wide look at the what the screens played as the guests walked in.
The show kicked off with a countdown that previewed many of the imagery that would play throughout the show.
We created an intro animation with sound and animated ambient backgrounds for each of the five major speakers.
We also created a looping hero image to be displayed on a large LED display at the hotel where the event was being held.
Our thanks to the teams at Czarnowski, Public School, and BMW for letting us join your race crew.
Credits
Client: Czarnowski/Public School
Creative Director at Public School: Lauren Bernstein
Senior Account Director at Czarnowski Collective: Brennon Dacquay
Video Content Producer at Czarnowski Collective: Beth Goodwin
Production Company: Elevation
Executive Creative Director: Stephen Cocks
Creative Director: David Hendrix
Senior Designer, Animator: Sean Kiley
Senior Producer: Alina Klopach