By this stage of the year, calling what we are experiencing in 2020 ‘strange times’ is beyond cliche, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It’s been the oddest of years and as such it’s given us the opportunity to pause a little, have a look around and take stock.

A couple of obvious questions that have popped up are where is the video production industry going, and where does Stanley & Morph fit within that?

I mean, who knows? Haha. If this year has taught us anything it’s that nobody knows anything!

Having said that, our industry, like most, is at the mercy of where technology leads us and on that front the last couple of years have seen some truly exciting developments that are pointing the way to where the future of video production may be headed – there’s a couple in particular we are really excited about.

ROBOTICS

Robotics, or more specifically referred to as Motion Control has been an integral component of big budget CGI led cinema for the last 15 years. However, more recently this technology is becoming more accessible to smaller budgets and as such is being used to great effect in all manner of video production all over the world including right here in Melbourne.

One of the pioneers of this technology in its relation to high end marketing videos is a fellow named Steve Giralt who hails from New York, USA. Steve calls himself a photographer, videographer and (our favourite) visual engineer. He’s been behind huge campaigns for a bunch of ‘table top’ products; all manner of food, drinks and make up. What makes Steve’s video production techniques so innovative is the use of robotics to capture his incredible images. Often, he and his team will use multiple robots, one controlling the camera, while two or three others control the elements in the shot, whether it be a glass that has to be slid into a perfect position while another robot arm might control a vessel that is to pour liquid into that glass at just the right angle – the use of robotics allows the team to control every single element to the nth degree.

This motion control, paired with a super high speed camera shooting at 1000 frames per second gives Steve and team the capacity to create insanely intricate, perfectly timed, highly dynamic video with very high production value. It’s awe inspiring stuff.

With this same technology now available here in Melbourne, we look forward to being able to create similar high end content for our own clients.

See Giralt in action the video below:

AUGMENTED REALITY

Augmented Reality is Virtual Reality’s less flighty, more solid cousin. As the name suggests it looks to augment reality rather than build it from scratch. And while so far its most popular iterations have been in gaming and entertainment (who can forget the hysteria caused by Pokemon Go a couple of years back) more recently it’s being used in other fields. AR is being used in marketing, education, retail and to great effect in training and education.

AR can be far more accessible to a potential audience as it can utilise the tech we already carry in our pockets; our phones, rather than having to wear a full headset. Research shows that a twice as much of the new work in AR is in industrial applications as opposed to consumer products and software, so there is no doubt that this form of video production and animation is an exciting, growing sector. It’s set to be a huge player in the next decade as more and more people embrace it and we as an industry fine-tune its powers.

All this gives us plenty to look forward to in regards to the future – there’s no doubt that there’ll be some exciting times ahead and Stanley & Morph will be at the forefront of the tech creating tasty videos and compelling content for many years to come!