Creative Times

Jon Humphreys and Ben Davies, two of the founding directors of The Neighbourhood, talk us through four projects and give us an insight into their growing studio.

We formed The Neighbourhood in July 2006 as four directors with a 10-year history in diverse fields of architecture, CG animation, digital media and illustration.

We combine new technology and storytelling to direct and produce bespoke illustration, animation and film for the architecture, broadcast and advertising sectors. We’re interested in the opportunities that new media formats and channels offer to creative film and image work, and we enjoy developing ideas driven projects through direct commissions and collaborations with other agencies.

It’s been a busy first 18 months. We’ve worked with global brands such as Sony Playstation and Formula One, completed large projects for key local clients such as Manchester City and Urban Splash, created content for city centre screens, spoken at international conferences and won industry awards for our self-led work. As well as the larger projects, we’re also excited by smaller independent projects, such as our ident work for Futuresonic, and film work with a leading artist at the Manchester International Festival. Now with a full-time team of eight, 2008 should be an exciting year, which will include a very special project with celebrity super-chef Heston Blumenthal.

After completing a 30-second animated sting to introduce the PS3 console at a large European launch event, we were re-commissioned for a second piece a few months later. This was a more creatively and technically ambitious commission requiring a 3-minute HD film to showcase 6 of the new game titles available on release of the PS3. We set about building and animating a 3D portal device to enter each game environment, a constantly evolving geometric ‘shardsnake’ structure. As well as giving this device personality and life, other challenges included bespoke transition sequences containing particle systems for stardust, dust clouds and explosions. Aside from the rewarding creative and technical achievements, this project gave us an opportunity to strengthen our relationships with established neighbouring agencies Bubble and Love Creative, who were also involved in the creative development of the campaign.

When Urban Splash approached us to assist with promoting Saxton and Lakeshore, their two largest projects of the year launching within a week of each other, we knew we would have to think fast and produce something special!

Urban Splash are always refreshingly accommodating and trusting with the amount of creative license they encourage, and Saxton was to prove no different. In addition to the seven marketing images we created to communicate the design of Saxton, we suggested six animations each with its own distinctive narrative and animation style relating to a key sales message. These bite-sized films allowed a flexible approach and a variety of possible uses, from iPod downloads, viral marketing, through to broadcasts on large urban screens in Leeds.

We made designer’s sketchbooks come to life, garden gnomes grow their own giant beanstalks, and cartoon communities, all which help paint a rich and entertaining picture of what Saxton and the Urban Splash brand is about.

One of our core values at The Neighbourhood is to appreciate and encourage self-generated work, and to ensure that we give space and time to develop those little ideas niggling away in the back of our heads. We call this Neighbourhood Play, and it’s one of a number of forums designed to nurture our people and our ideas. We bounce ideas around, inspire each other, and develop new techniques and pieces of work that ultimately help to inform our creative process.

Love Your Neighbourhood was an animation we developed as a Christmas gift to friends, colleagues, past and present clients, and hopefully a few future ones, too. Its completion coincided with our website going live and, to our surprise, it became a viral phenomenon within the first 48 hours. We had to increase our web bandwidth almost on the hour to accommodate the amount of hits and downloads from around the world. The piece went on to win a number of industry awards. We have just completed another piece to promote the launch of our latest website redesign called ‘Stories from the Neighbourhood’.

Inspired by some of our previous work in the property sector, Argent asked us for a fresh approach to help promote their new apartment scheme at Piccadilly Place, and Manchester as a city. Our solution was to base a narrative around a day in the life of a Hub resident, highlighting the benefits of city centre living without resorting to the clichés of ‘lifestyle’ imagery. To achieve this we directed a small cast of characters and props against a green screen and composited the footage into CG stage-sets and environments that we had designed. Shooting against green screen is an effective way of placing real characters in artificially created environments as we have seen in countless Hollywood movies, not even Pixar have perfected fully computer generated human characters yet!

T: 0161 907 3160
E: hello@the-neighbourhood.com
W: www.the-neighbourhood.com