Digital Kitchen, a leader in experiential marketing, and Target are creating an amazing new visual experience in Dallas' Victory Park, the city's innovative large-scale outdoor digital arts gallery (the largest of its kind in the world). The experience was also unveiled at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Digital Kitchen worked directly with Target to produce a pair of cool and lively animated videos, both featuring Target imagery and branding. They will play on eight high-resolution outdoor LED screens that are a permanent part of the Victory Park installation. The screens, complete with high-fidelity sound and theatrical lighting, move along horizontal tracks and offer a wide variety of configurations and motion possibilities; they can even be combined to form "super screens" - 31 feet tall and 53-feet-wide.
As beautiful and engaging as the videos themselves may be, the environment in which they're playing - and the experience they create as they play - is the true innovation. "Victory Park is perfect for experiential marketing," says Paul Matthaeus, Chief Creative Officer and Founder of Digital Kitchen. "Like Times Square in Manhattan or Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles, Victory Park is an immersive video environment. By taking full advantage of its architecture, technology, and programming, Digital Kitchen and Target have created a new and unique experience literally from the ground up - something much more memorable and effective than any traditional advertising campaign."
Both Victory Park videos feature Digital Kitchen's trademark combination of live action, 3-D, and 2-D animation, especially the piece called "Art Imagines" that has a heavily Latin look and feel. Set to lively Latin guitar music, dancer Duncan Tran, with the help of professional choreographer Daniel Haywood, performs an athletic, twisting martial arts/dance style called capoeira. With every movement of his body, images begin to blossom on the walls, and then literally grow from every surface: a South American jungle and mesa, a dazzling Latin city, a hot air balloon (decorated with the Target Logo). All burst up, spin around him... and then disappear, one at a time, as the dance winds down and the fantasy world retreats.
"We shot all of the dancing against a green screen in one day, then came back to Digital Kitchen and started building in all the 3-D," DK Creative Director Anthony Vitagliano says. "Then we comped in all the animated elements - both 2-D and 3-D - using the usual battery of tools: AfterEffects, Shake, and Maya."
The wide musical selections available at Target are highlighted in the companion 45-second piece, "Art Transports." Opening with a woman shuffling through her eclectic music collection, the viewer is taken on whimsical journeys, according to the style of music that is playing. While her City Jams play, she bikes through an urban landscape. For her Freestyle Jazz tunes, she hits the slopes, snowboarding her way through a red forest. And when she bumps her Dub Mix, she plunges into an underwater world replete with vibrant aquatic life.
Paying tribute to the ability of music to transport a listener to another time and place, this piece builds on the energy of a more sophisticated adult cartoon. The Digital Kitchen team incorporated more flat, traditional 2d line animation of the various backgrounds to subtly contrast with a more 3d main character. All throughout, the Target color palette, logo and branding are weaved into the scenery.