At Magic Media, we prioritize delivering industry-leading quality services to our clients and that is how we stand out from the competition. With a global team composed of diverse backgrounds, cultures, and skill sets, we offer a wide range of services, from full-cycle game development to specific art production, game VFX, and video production. But how do we achieve this level of quality? What is it really like working with Magic Media?

Let’s dive into the internal processes of Magic Media’s workflow with our clients. Spoiler alert: there are no hidden technologies or secret formulas! Instead, we rely on a passionate and talented team who work collectively to deliver the results you desire. Let’s have a closer look.

Magic Media’s Outsourcing Process

When you choose to work with Magic Media, you can expect a high level of commitment, investment, and passion from our team. Our experts seamlessly integrate into your game development process, immersing themselves in your team and workflow.

To ensure this seamless integration, we have established our own processes that align with how we work. Our game development process is marked by constant communication, agile approaches, and rigorous quality assurance.

Project Initiation for the Game Development Process

Before we begin creating, coding, or utilizing our expertize, the first step in the game development process is project initiation. This is where our team leaders and yours come together to understand your requirements, goals, and desired outcomes. Together, we establish a project plan and communication pipeline to ensure an effective and streamlined operation.

Planning and Scope Definition

During this early stage, we also define the planning and project scope. If we are assisting as co-developers, it is crucial for us to have a clear understanding of the project’s direction. We discuss deliverables, timelines, and budgets. Together, we create a detailed project plan, identifying necessary resources, team members, and setting milestones.

Agile Development Approach

When it comes to the actual development work, we adopt an agile development approach. This approach is highly effective for game development, given its iterative and incremental nature. It also aligns well with our flexible, adaptive, and continuously improving work style.

Game Development Built on Communication and Client Collaboration 

While delivering high-quality services is important, ensuring that our work aligns with your vision is equally crucial. From the beginning of the project, we provide a single point of contact to ensure your voice is heard, and requests are efficiently communicated. You have access to our entire team, and we maintain regular check-ins through meetings, emails, and other project management tools.

We offer micro and macro check-ins at any point to track project progress, address challenges, and ensure we meet your expectations. Through these regular check-ins throughout the project lifecycle, you will have a clear understanding of our progress and how we align with your expectations. This direct line of communication allows us to address any concerns or queries promptly.

The Game Development Process and Quality Assurance

Quality assurance is a constant aspect of all our video game outsourcing services. Whether we are delivering art, development, or game trailers, our team has internal processes in place to ensure the promised quality is achieved.

Before any work reaches your screen, we conduct comprehensive testing, bug fixing, and iterative improvements to meet our high standards and yours. We strive to deliver our work to you with the utmost quality, meeting established milestones.

Market Research

We are committed to continuously improving the quality and efficiency of our work. Regularly assessing the game development process is crucial to stay ahead of modern trends, tools, and methodologies.

Our teams actively research market trends, investigate target audience preferences, explore new technologies, and keep an eye on our competitors. This research ensures we stay current with player interests and maintain efficient game development workflows.

With these insights, we implement new practices. Our talented game development team, consisting of artists, animators, developers, designers, and more, constantly test new technologies and methodologies. Alongside user feedback, our experts are always prepared to deliver engaging and marketable games.

Team Composition

At Magic Media, we tailor each team to suit your project’s specific needs. We don’t just provide a concept artist; we provide an artist who is genuinely interested and passionate about your game’s genre or style. Our diverse and global team ensures that we always have the right person for your project.

We don’t just want to deliver experts who can create industry-leading results. We want to provide you with an outsourcing or co-development team that is genuinely interested and enthusiastic about being a part of your work.

If you are interested in utilizing our expertize in full-cycle development, co-development, game porting, art production, game VFX, or any of our comprehensive services, please get in touch with us today. We are always ready to create magic together!

Brand videos are an indispensable aspect of modern marketing campaigns. In the current digital age of advertising and widespread online presence, it’s more important than ever to make your brand stand out as much as possible and relate to potential customers. You can impart information about your organization through video content and convince viewers you’re worthy of their attention and business.

Through the Magic Media team’s experience, we understand that while product and performance videos are essential for user acquisition and lead generation, brand video content is the best for communicating your brand’s identity. Though there is no single way to craft them, brand videos are unquestionably important for modern marketing campaigns.

Establishing Brand Identity

Brand videos aim to highlight the individual qualities and beliefs of a brand. Through video production, a brand’s core values and mission statement can be effectively communicated through the use of storytelling tools. The video’s narrative, people, use of color, plot, and more are gateways to communicating critical information about the brand, regardless of what the core values and messaging are.

It’s crucial to communicate these aspects at a high level so that anyone can watch the video and understand more about the brand and relate to it. Doing so helps a brand exude a sense of authenticity that possible customers will associate with it. This is an especially important practice for newer brands or those looking to expand their online presence. Many industries and markets are crowded with notable names, so clear, relatable communication is helpful to stand out from the rest.

Brand Videos Help SEO

Another benefit of brand video content as part of marketing campaigns is that it can be highly beneficial for search engine optimization (SEO). Google is arguably the biggest platform for SEO concerns, and it has an algorithm that highly favors multimedia content, especially video. Using video content will help your brand climb the search results naturally and help increase traffic to your website.

The benefits of using brand videos, in this sense, are multifaceted. Using them as a core component of your marketing strategy not only helps viewers understand your brand more from the video content itself, but it also actively increases your discoverability at the same time by positively influencing your SEO rankings.

Differentiating from the Competition

Brand videos are a surefire way to help stand out from the competition in crowded marketplaces. Explainers, product, performance, and other marketing video types help in key areas of user acquisition and engagement and help drive website traffic, but brand videos are critical to setting the brand apart. Through Magic Media’s video production experience we’ve found that creating memorable brand video content that includes messaging, visuals, and values linked to the brand, it can be distinguished in the minds of possible customers.

Creating memorable enough video content can help viewers recall your brand when they’re looking to address their needs for the products or services your organization provides. Video content tends to be more inherently memorable than text, so positioning your brand through video tends to be more effective. Publishing brand videos on a variety of platforms, including the main social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram, helps cultivate a larger online presence and a consistent widespread message. The repetition of the messaging contained within your brand videos across these platforms makes it stand out even further and linger in the minds of the widest audience possible.

Magic Media veterans of the tech, gaming, and entertainment sectors, providing world-class video production services to a wide client base. We’re proud to offer an extensive range of services including real-time VFX, full-cycle game production, and more. Contact us today to leverage our experience and expertize, and let’s create magic!

Narrative advertisements are lesser seen compared to gameplay-related video content, but they’re nonetheless an important tool in driving player engagement in your games. Where gameplay videos show how players interact with the game world and the actions they will be taking, narrative ads showcase the characters, story, and lore.

This video content tends to be more complex to produce for a multitude of reasons, but the rewards of a well-crafted narrative video can easily outweigh the challenges of creating them. Though gameplay videos are necessary and effective at conveying a game’s mechanics, more often than not, a game is far more than just its gameplay elements.

Player Investment

Narrative ads are an effective tool for engaging players with your game and its world. Gameplay video content is a proven way of showcasing gameplay mechanics and helping players understand the actions they take in your title. Narrative videos can enrich the experience by revealing the story, world, characters, and motivations.

These videos bring context to the gameplay experience. Though solid gameplay mechanics are enough to entice a large portion of gamers, some players seek compelling character and narrative elements for a game to resonate with them. Providing players with reasons to like a protagonist and despise a villain can lead to player investment and attract an audience that could otherwise be disinterested.

Gauging Player Interest

In our wealth of experience producing narrative advertisements, particularly the Igloo Gaming team, we’ve seen that they can deliver high levels of click-through rates. We consider this evidence that narrative ads drive player investment and desire to learn more about the advertised game. This makes it necessary to include a strong call to action in narrative ads. Without a call to action, we would have no way of understanding the positive effects narrative ads have on player interest.

Though narrative advertisements don’t tend to boast the highest conversion rates, in conjunction with gameplay video content as part of the same campaign, it’s possible to yield considerable results. Gameplay trailers have a proven ability to produce significant conversion rates. Using these with narrative ads can not only increase player interest but potentially earn new customers as well.

Challenges of Producing Narrative Ads

Narrative advertisements can present challenges to craft. Getting the right footage to show that isn’t too gameplay-focused requires a thorough approach. This can be even more challenging with some titles that don’t have stories. This commonly happens with casual and mobile games that are perhaps more simple in their scope and design, and use their game mechanics to drive player engagement. In these cases, narrative details need to be created from the ground up for advertisements.

Crafting original lore, character, and story content can seem daunting at first, but through careful collaboration, it can be achieved to fantastic results. Working with designers and artists to create character and world information that’s consistent with the design is crucial. We’ve seen that narrative ads can have the greatest impact on established games and brands, though that’s not to say they can’t be beneficial for newer titles and IPs.

It’s important to include some gameplay footage in narrative advertisements. It shouldn’t be the focus, but it should act as supplementary footage to the narrative details and ideas being showcased. Without gameplay, potential players might feel the narrative is disconnected from it and lose interest as a result. By including gameplay in narrative advertisements, the overall experience is enriched while making a clear connection between the story and gameplay.

Magic Media is proud to provide a wide range of services across gaming and entertainment, including animation, full-cycle game development, VFX, and more. We’d love the opportunity to be your one-stop solution for your projects, so get in contact with us today, and let’s create magic.

A sizeable portion of video marketing content is aimed toward growth – acquiring new users, showcasing your product in the best way possible, and why it stands out in its market. This kind of video marketing is crucial to the success of any business, but how can an existing user base be served?

In the gaming industry, customer relationship marketing (CRM) plays a vital role in the continued success of any games designed to have a long shelf life and that receive significant post-launch support. Though CRM videos have a lot in common with other marketing video types, like the performance videos crafted by Igloo Creative House, they have different purposes, require a different approach, and contain different nuances.

Connecting With Your Existing Audience

From the experience of Igloo Gaming, a Magic Media company, customer relationship marketing videos are about connecting with your existing audience rather than building it. When creating video content to build a new audience for a new game, showcasing in the most broadly appealing way for your target audience is a good idea to interest as many potential customers as possible.

CRM videos are generally used to address existing or potentially returning players for your game. With this in mind, CRM video content can have a narrower focus. Instead of the focus being the whole game, CRM videos would focus on particular aspects of a game that could appeal to existing players.

Using CRM Videos For Your Game

If there is an exciting new feature debuting in your game soon, then CRM video is the perfect way to market it. While the composition of a CRM video, as detailed before by Igloo Creative House, might be similar to other marketing videos, the language used to communicate your new feature is different.

The advantage of marketing to your current audience is that you can be more direct in your language, as you’re not trying to establish a user base with wide-ranging language use. It’s not uncommon to see some titles use in-game terminology that players are familiar with to entice them with a new game feature, and it’s something that our video experts at Igloo Gaming, part of the Magic Media group, believe can bring a lot of character and charm to CRM videos.

We’ve seen that casual games, in particular, can benefit greatly from CRM videos. It’s common practice for games of the genre to have in-app purchases and regular sales for them. A CRM video can also serve LiveOps for games. LiveOps refers to updates and enhancements made to titles that don’t require the release of a brand-new version of it. LiveOps updates often include new gameplay activities, and highlighting them with a CRM video is a clever way to keep your audience clued into the latest content.

Goals & Challenges of CRM Videos

The overall aim of CRM videos, like those that Igloo Gaming creates, can be to keep your current audience engaged, whether that is through marketing your new sale on in-game purchases or a new feature. Fortunately, we’ve seen from Igloo Gaming and the wider Magic Media group’s experience that it’s easy to measure if your CRM video has been successful in achieving its goal.

User data can easily highlight if it has been a success. For instance, if CRM video content has been created for a new bonus level in your casual game, data can be analyzed to see how many players played the level. Similarly with sales, it’s easy to see if there has been an uptick in purchases of sale items and by how much.

CRM video is subject to many of the same challenges as other marketing video content – getting the key messages right, length, and tone of voice – but one thing we’re specifically conscious of is avoiding gameplay interruption. Experienced players won’t want their experience skewed, even if it is for an exciting new gameplay feature, so it’s imperative to be aware of CRM video length and placement when marketing for your existing user base.

For your CRM video needs, a trusted and experienced video partner is the best way to go. Take a look at our reels today and make sure to get in contact with us, we love the opportunity to deliver world-class gaming industry video content.

The Igloo Gaming team has had the pleasure of working with many clients who make games in many different styles and genres. Word games, casual games in fantasy settings, and pirate adventures, it’s exciting to work on such a variety of games that allow us to exercise our creativity.

While each project can be wildly different from the last, we have several key steps involved in the production process of creating videos and animations. Working on video content, like user acquisition commercials, for these gaming projects can be a slightly different process from working on trailers!

Initial Steps

It all starts with meeting the client. This is crucial so that we can understand the target audience the client wants us to attract and the game we’re going to be promoting.

In this meeting, we also like to see if the client has any ideas of their own. It’s great when they do as this can inspire our creative process and help us come up with pitches. The client’s suggestions can feed our work, and in turn, our work at every stage can help the client view their game in a different light, with new ways to convey it they might not have previously considered.

Pitches

After much discussion, we create some work and get some ideas together for what we call a creative pitch presentation. In these presentations, we like to present our clients with multiple possible creative directions.

We try as much as possible to incorporate a game’s distinctive visual style into our video content. This can create a sense of familiarity with fans of the game and engage them quickly. In a video we made for Zynga, we decided to use Lumbo the Lumberjack from Farmville to tell a fish out of water story of him finding himself in an unfamiliar urban environment.

These presentations typically include sketches and written pieces to help us and our clients visualize what our finished video might look like. Igloo Gaming’s Creative Director, Producers, and Animation Director are directly involved in this stage of the process.

Writing the Script

Once a direction has been agreed upon, we move on to writing the script for the video. This is a critical step in the production process because script writing for our purposes is different from the traditional script writing format.

The script is important to coordinate what we see with what we hear. It establishes the visual elements of the video, as well as audio elements like voiceover and its timing. Timing is everything, and this document helps put all the pieces we need into place.

We don’t limit the script-writing phase in terms of revisions. We believe that there shouldn’t be a hard limit on how many we do because, ultimately, we only want to move forward to the next stage if the client is completely comfortable. Our clients are always open to participating and giving feedback to help the project move forward in the best way possible.

Design & Visualization

The next step is a leap forward in helping our client get a glimpse into what the final video will look like. Next, we create storyboards to present to our clients so that they can get an understanding of the direction the video is going in. We like to use materials provided by the clients directly, such as key art, to represent the video.

We present a full design of the video to the client for approval, which is an opportunity for them to comment and provide feedback. Whether it’s the text that doesn’t look right, if an in-game element can be represented better, or if the copy should be tweaked, we’re happy to get any feedback and make adjustments accordingly.

In the design phase, we have to keep in mind that the video will more often than not need to be created for a variety of aspect ratios. It’s not uncommon for us to make them for 1:1, 16:9, and 4:5 for some social media platforms. By keeping this in mind early in the process, it doesn’t become a potential issue later on!

Production

Once our client has approved the storyboards and we have addressed any feedback we received, we can then move ahead with the full production phase. At this point, animators receive the script, and aspects of the production such as available resources, camera angles, and motion, are considered.

We kick off production with a meeting between Igloo Gaming’s Directors, Animators, and Designers before the Animation Director breaks it down and assigns Animators to different scenes and shots.

We’re always as detailed as possible with our visual descriptions, but they should be open to interpretation without straying too far from what was agreed upon with the client. Our main goal is always to deliver the client’s vision, but we should try and be creative where possible!

While the animation work is in progress, the voiceover audio is recorded. We keep in communication with our clients through production, including twice-weekly updates with examples of the work we’ve completed. This is to ensure that if any changes are required, they’re spotted quickly, so we can then act on them as soon as possible.

Finishing Touches

Once the main production is finished, we send the client the project including voiceover audio and music. At this stage, we can tidy up the video based on any feedback the client provides, as well as add sound effects and any other required minor changes.

Thanks to our consistent communication with our clients throughout our projects, they’re never startled by anything we send them. We like to bring clients with us on the journey of making videos for their games, and they’re kept in the loop every step of the way.

We make a concentrated effort to keep our files organized for use during production, and also after. It’s not uncommon for our clients to want to iterate on user acquisition videos. Often, a client might want to show different gameplay, have gameplay come in sooner, or change the flow of a video to suit different needs, and this is something we prepare for here at Igloo Gaming.

This approach has helped us establish lasting client relationships and helped us create the best possible videos for their games. Our prioritization of communication has been a common element of our best work. Check out the video that we completed for Farmville 3!

If you require a game trailer or video ad, we’re here to help. We can also provide cinematics, full-cycle development, and many other services. Get in touch today, we’ll be happy to bring magic to your project!

Game trailers are everywhere within the gaming industry. From AAA to indie titles, game trailers are almost obligatory for most releases. Both cinematic trailers that highlight narrative elements of a game and trailers exhibiting gameplay features are cornerstones of a game’s pre-release marketing campaign.

While game trailers are a fact of life within the industry, what makes them so important? Let’s look at why game trailers are indispensable for games and how we create them!

Why They’re Important

Game trailers are crucial for advertising to their target audiences and instrumental in creating an understanding of the game and what it’s about before it launches. Game trailers can give an impression of what kind of graphics can be expected and the type of music the game will have, and some trailers can act as a way of highlighting key gameplay features.

A trailer should represent a game and give players an idea of what to expect when it launches. We’ve had the opportunity to work with some illustrious clients and instill their brand identity and unique characteristics of their titles in the trailers we make. You can see some of our video ads portfolio to see how we brought ideas to life.

Initial Concept and First Steps

No matter the game, the process begins with an agreement with the client. Once we come on board to craft a game trailer, we calculate timelines for each stage of the project’s production. When we have a fixed timeline for each stage of production, we can then assign artists. Depending on the trailer, we can allocate artists based on the visual style we’re aiming to achieve. When the project’s schedule is laid out and our artists have been designated, then we can really let our creative juices flow!

With a plan in place, we can begin getting creative and produce several different concepts. It’s important we work on a few different concepts that we can use and morph into the final product. Ultimately, our client is our top priority and they have the final say as to what concept we move forward with. Bearing this in mind, it’s prudent for us to have a few different ideas that our clients can look at and choose from.

Storyboarding and Bringing It Together

After our client has selected the concept they want to move forward with, we can begin working on storyboards. Storyboards are essential to our process as it allows us to clearly lay out sequences and the major elements of each scene. The next step is to create style frames based on the storyboards. Style frames are simple visual representations of scenes that are particularly important to introduce a basic visual framework that we can build on.

With a structure in place, we can then begin to animate the scenes. This process requires painstaking attention to detail to ensure that each aspect of the scene is animated correctly and that the principles of animation are adhered to.

Another key aspect of building a game trailer is the sound design. The audio elements of the trailer are indispensable for bringing a trailer to life and help make the animation pop. Once we’re pleased with the animation, sound, and flow of a trailer, we can apply finishing touches to the project to really add detail to it.

What a Game Trailer Achieves

A game trailer could be compared to the cover of a book. While there are many different books on the shelves in a library, it’s the ones with the most eye-catching covers and synopses that get attention. A great trailer captures the core elements of a game and hooks in an audience, and this is where we step in to help clients.

It’s an exciting creative challenge to balance exercising our own creativity with the needs of clients and the brand we need to represent in our trailers. Our goal is for viewers to recognize the product within the first three seconds of a trailer. We often approach this by utilizing a brand’s color palette and familiar sounds associated with them to make our trailers more identifiable.

Whether a client requests we stay close to the brand’s design in our animations or provide the freedom for us to stretch our creative muscles, our main aim is to give products a trailer that truly captures its spirit and informs an audience as to what they can expect from it.

If you’re in need of game trailer and video ad services, you can learn more here. If you’re in need of other services, such as cinematics or game development, visit our services page or get in touch. We’re ready and waiting to help bring the magic to your project.

We’ve covered technical positions previously in the Day in the Life series, but let’s talk about one of the most important roles for any video production team: the Project Manager. From keeping a project on track, to liaising between team members and the client, the Project Manager is the glue that holds everything together. And that glue is key in delivering the quality found in our Video Ad service offerings.

We spoke with Magic Media and Igloo Creative House’s Senior Project Manager, Dana Dagan, to find out more. After serving as a photographer in the military, Dana studied content writing and worked on film sets, in the process having learned how to work with a global set of clients and suppliers. She has been with Igloo for 3 years, using her combined skills and experience to oversee multiple projects at any given time.

What is a Project Manager?

If a Project Manager was to be defined in three simple terms, Dana says, it would be: calculation, authority, and sensitivity.

And in her own words, the Project Manager is ‘the person with the bigger picture.’ They always have the client’s directive in mind, with a promise to take care of their product, and to get the best value for their money. 

On the other hand, a Project Manager is on the front line to all employees. They ensure the team is receiving the support it needs, while prioritizing the pipeline schedule. More than anything, problem-solving is the main facet of the job. The job revolves around ‘people and situations,’ and possessing the ability to find solutions on the spot.

What’s a typical day like?

In the morning, Dana starts by reading the studio’s schedule for the day. Although a project manager needs to consider every aspect of a single project, another key element to their role is multitasking. For Dana, it’s much better to know about every project in the studio, instead of just hers. This way, she can support the other project managers if required, while also considering the workload of the team as a whole. 

On the way to the studio, she reads and responds to emails, making sure if there’s important information, or changes, to the morning’s tasks. Throughout the day, the Project Manager has meet-ups with each team about new tasks, as well as video-calls with clients either requesting progress updates, or kick-starting a new project. 

For the majority of the day, Dana is the person in the middle: with the client’s feedback on one hand, and the team’s perspective on the other. In between, she makes the schedules and deliverables to the clients, making sure every day that her assigned projects are on the safe side with their time and budgets.

Overcoming Challenges

For a Project Manager, the greatest obstacle in the way of a project’s quality is miscommunication with the client, including setting clear expectations of each other. As Dana explains, they are constantly seeking to prevent disappointment by establishing, in advance, what can be realistically achieved within the budget and time-frame. 

This dynamic is sometimes similar in working with the creative teams as well. Trust plays a major part, as the Project Manager is the main point of contact throughout the project. Your creative teams rightly keep high expectations of you when it comes to backing them up at every stage of the production pipeline.

But Dana stresses that the whole situation isn’t life and death! Project managers can easily take things to heart because of the care needed for every project. In order to keep things balanced, she recommends holding regular meetings with your team to clarify and adapt your work-flow strategy, with a mind to delivering the best possible product for your client.

Production Process

Each project varies in its scope and scale, and so the production process can alternate. Igloo has its separate Creative House and Gaming domains; each studio is very different from the other. In the Gaming studio, they deal with leading international clients, creating slick designs for slot and poker ads, which includes a lot of 3D work. Meanwhile, the Creative House team is smaller, crafting promotional videos for high-tech clients. 

The Project Manager is involved from the get-go in every project. Dana starts with getting to know the client in a meet-up: ascertaining the project’s needs, providing a quote, setting a schedule. All of this information is then collated into Igloo’s task management software. 

Once pre-production has begun, the client reviews almost every stage of the process. This entails that the Project Manager oversee deliveries and review calls, alongside notifying the team of any changes in the pipeline. 

At each step, they update the project status to their own managers, raising key questions about the team’s progress and if we are correctly bringing the client’s vision to life. And even though every project has its own Art Director, Project Managers have the final word on whether a project makes sense as a whole.

According to Dana, projects are very dynamic, especially in the video domain. Therefore, they require a manager that is in touch with all bases at once, and most importantly with the client. That relationship is a part of what keeps the client coming back and makes the hard work worthwhile.

Thank you for checking out this day-in-the-life of a Project Manager, undeniably one of the most important roles for any production. Seeking a career in games, entertainment, VFX, or cybersecurity? Check out our careers page for more information. Or, if you’re interested in collaborating with us on a project, or using our services, talk to us today.

For most purposes, creating an animation video first depends on your choice of medium: 2D or 3D, and if you’re looking to understand the difference between 2D and 3D animation, keep reading!

2D and 3D animation

2D animation is considered the ‘traditional’ option, still billed as the cost- and time-effective approach, but lacking in realistic detail. On the other hand, 3D animation – with its engrossing environments, detailed characters, and immersive camera motion – excels in all but the quantity of time and resources required to bring it to life. Consequently, the process of blending 2D and 3D animation, or ‘mixed media,’ has grown in popularity for video-makers in the recent past. It presents a unique approach to extracting the most engaging aspects of each technique, but within a more balanced, economical framework. 

This style-blending means that you can infuse your presentation with the singular character of a 2D caricature, but imbue it with vivid, life-like detail through the creation of 3D environments and realistic physical effects. For ‘Little Hibboux,’ we were tasked with creating just that: a 2D-rendered owl mascot who takes us from a live-action scene to a fully-realized 3D environment. 

From scratch, we start with designing storyboards and animatics for our client, who wanted a video to promote their brand. Although many of the designs in these presentations may seem rudimentary to begin with, these animatics help us get a sense of the timings of the video. Based on this, we also construct a 3D animatic, allowing us to determine the overall camera movement of the piece, as well as to get an early sense of how the 3D elements will behave.

Moreover, this process permits us to isolate 2-3 ‘style frames’: these are fully-styled single images that serve as proof-of-concept references for the final designs of the video. For the owl mascot, these style frames were crucial in identifying the nature of the main character, and what kind of tone its style would convey throughout the narrative. Crucially, extracting style frames allowed us to figure out if the blend between these 2D/3D elements was feasible in the long-run – for us and for our client. 

After we finished work with the animatics, their 3D assets were exported with markers to assign the areas where the 2D features should come in. Meanwhile, the 2D animators worked on their part (the owl characters) and place them inside the 3D environments according to these markers. Finally, in the post-production stage, we stylize the 2D characters to accurately match them to their 3D environments, thereby completing the integration of both media successfully.

If you’re looking for a blend of 2D and 3D animation for your video ads, contact us today and let’s see if we can sprinkle your project with a bit of magic!

We are delighted to announce that Igloo Creative House and Igloo Gaming have joined the Magic Media group! 

Igloo Creative House are a creative agency and animation studio based in Tel Aviv. They specialize in video ads and have created some spectacular material for companies all over the world. Their videos tell the stories of brilliant people, products, and brands with a strong emphasis on putting creativity first for a high quality of production. 

We look forward to helping Igloo Creative House and Igloo Gaming expand further worldwide. We couldn’t be happier to have their creative and meaningful video skills added to the plethora of services already available at Magic Media.  

 With this partnership we have expanded our skills, services and video ads portfolio even further, helping us to become the global leader in the A-Z services for the games and entertainment industry.