Working with our friends CPL to create big screen content is always a joy AND a challenge. Each year the Tropic Skincare Glammies event gets bigger and bigger, as do the screens and the amount of content required. Over the past five years the event has grown to its current home Resorts World Arena.

We’ve become experts in creating bespoke content for the disguise platform, using Notch codecs to create huge resolution, themed content displayed on CPL’s uniquely configured ROE Visual LED panels.

For their last event we created six bespoke music videos all synched to track, including three nineties themed music videos for Heather Small, together with 50 recognition slides, bespoke backdrops and event theming content in ridiculous resolutions, shapes and sizes.

The Purpose

The huge bi-annual ‘Glammies’ awards ceremony & product launch for Tropic Skincare is a full-on extravaganza. Colour, costume, choreography, and sooo much energy! We always look forward to a Tropics brief because we get to work out how to best contribute to that energy. The events feature in-the-round staging, full band, dance routines, glitter cannons, and very crazy costumes. We get to add gigantic graphics for the big screens, and we absolutely love it.

This biannual event is an opportunity for Tropic Ambassadors from across the UK to come together, celebrate achievements and discover new products. Our creation of bespoke content reflects the tone and excitement of the Glammies and is a vital part of the event. It helps convey the event’s message and theme, ensuring that all the attendees are fully immersed in the Jungle Disco experience!

How we made it possible through planning, communication and creativity

‘Those’ screens!

Before we start work on a project like this, we need to do some essential planning, especially when working across multiple screens in an arena environment. Here’s what we consider:

• Content creation approach: Should we use a single canvas or multiple canvas’ stitched together in Disguise?
• Pixel map: Creating a map of pixels to ensure all the content fits the screens.
• Viewing angles: Determining what will be visible from different angles in the audience.
• Safe areas: Identifying areas where we can place text and crucial content that must be visible everywhere.

To do this we start by building a canvas in After Effects and Adobe Premiere and filling it with test material, this is loaded into Disguise’ preview program and goes back and forth until we are happy. From this we create an overlay grid guide for reference. This is overlaid on all the content we create and informs everything we do.

The Content

Jungle Disco Backdrop

To get the most out of the Jungle Disco general state (The backdrop for most of the show) We decided to build something from scratch rather than use an existing asset, such as a stock rainforest landscape. We built the canvas using individual assets sourced from stock. Building the scene like a big jigsaw puzzle meant we had control over many more elements of the scene, making different ‘bits’ move:

• Leaves could sway and move in the ‘breeze’.
• We could add in birds and animals.
• Disco balls could rotate with light refracting off the disco balls.
• Rainforest ‘smog’ could pass through the environment.

It was crucial that the general state backgrounds looped seamlessly to not hinder the effect we had worked hard to create. Each video would loop every two minutes, which meant that the beginning and final frame of each video needed to be identical. With so many moving elements in one video, the task of syncing all the elements up meant that their movement values much reach the same number at the start and end of the video to create a seamless effect.

Six Bespoke Music Tracks

The Tropics show features several dance music numbers each requiring themed, timed music videos. These are all tiled together from stock footage libraries, again creating a huge jigsaw mosaic. The shows creative director will give us a theme for each number and a very rough mood board.

• Stock footage trawl: We’ll search for footage that aligns with the theme and lyrics of the song. For example, “Came here for love” required stock footage of hearts, keys, and saxophone.
• Footage Jigsaw: Mixing footage of musical instruments, dancers, special effects, and equaliser visualisers with on brand text colour and animations, layering it all perfectly so that it fits the required (and unusual!) aspect ratio.
• Creating bespoke content: to fill in any gaps, sometimes overlaying multiple clips to achieve the effect we want.
• Refining the edit: We’ll go back through the edit, re-timing content and hiding seams between pieces of footage.

Recognition Animations x 50

A huge part of the Tropics Glammies are the 50 animated slides with names, intros, and congratulations for 16 categories of award. To accommodate the fast turnaround of these films and the need to amend content up to the wire we:

• Worked incredibly closely with the team at Tropics to review and amend where needed.
• Created project files far in advance using pre-rendered layers so that we could just amend the words that needed changing without the need to render full files out every time.
• Split the screens out so each export was less time consuming and eased the load on the playback machine, ensuring there were no glitches when it came to live playback through Disguise.
• Provided on-site support for last minute tinkering and editing.

Meaningful and memorable deliverables

Seeing a true extravaganza come together is always exhilarating.  Being asked to play such an integral part in the visual production on multiple occasions has proven our capabilities in this area and continues to be a real joy.

It’s one thing seeing your content played back to audiences on YouTube but something else to see it enjoyed by 5000 punters on screens this size.

Great job satisfaction for the team!

“We have worked with Method in Motion for several years, on our large-scale events. They always hit the brief for us. And are a great team to have on our suppliers list. Knowing we have their support pre and post event is a great comfort.”  Lee G at CPL