MRI Ascend 22 & MRI Agora

All great things begin with a dream.

This phrase inspired the opening video for the MRI Ascend 2022 conference. Starting with the tagline of “Dream. Believe. Achieve,” MRI focused their biggest event of the year around supporting dreamers.

Our job was to bring those dreamy ideas to life through an animated conference kick-off video while maintaining the colorful 2D visual language consistent with the MRI brand.

Visions of dreams

Dreams are elusive and abstract. A dream could be as wild as kaleidoscope of colors bursting in the sky, or as mundane as reading a case study on a creative company’s website. (Maybe you’re dreaming right now.)

With the opening of this animation, we wanted to capture that ethereal feeling of dreams. This set the story in motion, moving from the imaginary to the real — from swirling shapes to a fully formed community.

We were inspired by the “Imagination Room” from Pixar’s Inside Out and their use of dimension to signify complexity. It worked well to visualize an idea as abstract as thoughts or dreams. While they deconstructed thoughts from full 3D into a basic line, we took the opposite approach by constructing shapes to show an idea transforming into a city.

Same style, new tone

For this project, we extended the “Global Anytown” style that we’ve honed with MRI over previous years for product animations and prior MRI Ascend conferences.

However, this year’s video had a noticeable shift in tone from previous projects.

With a more dramatic voiceover and score, we matched the pace and intensity by gradually building scenes and utilizing dreamy camera moves.

As the MRI Software is introduced, we subtly shifted focus from colorful dreamscapes to an animated real world scene, helping to illustrate MRI’s commitment of transforming dreams into reality.

Enter the Agora

Not wanting to stop there, MRI asked us to create a companion video for the launch of their newest product: MRI Agora.

MRI Agora is the company’s long awaited AI-powered PropTech platform. The name comes from the ancient Greek Agora, where ideas, commerce, and community came together and flourished.

In that same vein, MRI Agora aims to intersect the digital and physical aspects of PropTech, creating a one-stop shop for everything the industry has to offer.