Wiredrive caught up with Ed Ulbrich, President of visual effects company Digital Domain, during the 2010 PromaxBDA conference in Los Angeles. Ulbrich talked about the trend in entertainment marketing to bring brands into the creative process earlier in order to develop additional content. The idea is to give consumers who really responded to the film, video game, TV show, or whatever the source product may be, a way to unlock content that sits alongside the traditional marketing materials. By unlocking content, consumers get deeper, much richer experience.
by Bill Sewell 06/05/09
“It’s about time for this conference” – Ed Ulbrich, Digital Domain
I totally agree, especially after attending Digital Hollywood and the Clios. In fact, the most interesting components of those conferences revolved around technology, which was the 100% focus of CaT. The 400+ attendance and energy level at the first Creativity and Technology conference proved that people are hungry to better understand the effects of when creativity and digital toolsets collide. Creativity and technology are hand-in-glove components of storytelling. In fact, people like David Fincher (director of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) truly understand that as long as there is a clear vision, passion and creative point of view, anything is possible. It also helps to have absurdly large budgets and seemingly endless timeframes.
Ed’s presentation on making Brad Pitt digital was awesome. Coincidentally, I went outside right afterward and was interested to learn about oddcast, which allows you to upload your own image and incorporate it into videos that have already been completed. It’s not nearly as sharp as Digital Domain’s work, but it shows how great ideas filter down into the community at different levels.
“We’ve moved from having a scarcity of channels and abundance of attention towards a scarcity of attention and abundance of channels” – Kevin Slaven, Area / Code
Kevin provided the most eloquent statement of the most common and resonant them from Digital Hollywood, the Clios and the CAT conference. Another recurring metaphor is that brands are arriving late to a party that has been going on for a long time (i.e. consumer conversations) and are entering awkwardly into said conversations.