Snowball: POP Creative Studio Builds Large CGI Environments for High-Res Stills and Animation

The challenge in healthcare advertising is translating complex medical concepts into compelling visual narratives that resonate with viewers. POP Creative Studio uses technology to add depth and perspective to storytelling. For a campaign with McCann Health NJ to raise awareness about the increased risk of prostate cancer, they created “Snowball”, an animation that uses a metaphor to drive home the message. 

POP was tasked with creating a photorealistic CGI landscape, including a few different landscape elements. Having to balance storytelling needs with technical execution is what POP is best at, and through meticulous planning, cutting-edge tools, and a deeply collaborative workflow, POP transformed an abstract idea into a practical campaign. We spoke with POP about the process, biggest challenge, how their cloud-based model supports a big project like this, and more.

What was the "Snowball" project, and what was its purpose?

The "Snowball" project was a healthcare campaign designed to raise awareness about the increased risk of prostate cancer. The concept revolved around the snowball effect, illustrating how unchecked prostate growth can rapidly escalate. Our goal was to create a visually impactful, fully CGI environment to support the campaign’s message, featuring bespoke scenes for stills and animations. The project was commissioned by McCann Health NJ and in collaboration with our good friends over at Taylor James NY.

What are the biggest creative and technical challenges when building large CGI environments?

The challenge as always is to push the quality as much as possible, whilst keeping an adaptable process for creative iteration, and of course, meet a tight deadline! For the "Snowball" project, our focus was on creating a detailed and scalable environment to meet the varied terrain topography needed to tell the story. All design decisions for the environment needed to correlate to the metaphor we were looking to convey. From the innocuous gentle slopes and soft snow at the start of the animation, to the quickly increasing rocky inclines of the mountains and the carved-out plateaus for the cabin and the threat to human life ahead. The landscape elements needed to tell the story throughout a 20-second animation, whilst also as a condensed composition for hires stills imagery, adapted for both tall and wide formats. 

Can you explain your process for creating large-scale CG terrains and environments?

It takes a lot of upfront planning to ensure the most efficient production, not only for visual consistency but to allow flexibility for creative iteration whilst maximising the repurposing of assets throughout the campaign. We naturally do a lot of research, sourcing hundreds of photo reference images, from vast mountain ranges and log cabin designs to macro images of pine needles and detailed snow textures. It’s about analysing as much realism as possible and identifying the key elements that we need to reconstruct in CGI. For the mountain terrains, we used Gaea, a 3D terrain generation tool, that allowed us to simulate geological structures and snow dynamics based on accurate erosion and snowmelt patterns from satellite maps. It's a truly incredible software and something we use when creating large CGI environments to give us a very realistic ground topology for all our scenes. In addition to that, we then use photo-scanned textures and models, such as Quixel Megascans alongside bespoke modeling and texture painting. 

What are the differences creating CGI scenes for animation compared to stills imagery?

For stills imagery, this is very much focussed on intricate details, modeling, textures, and lighting that hold up for 12,000 pixels outputs. For motion, we also have to consider forces such as gravity, wind, and turbulence, which means combining physics and particle simulations into our VFX pipeline. This brings a whole different set of complexities to the process, but ones that are crucial in creating authentic snow build-up on close-up tree branches and the simulation forces needed to shake and collapse the snow in a physically accurate way.

Do you use different teams and artists for your stills and motion projects?

Some skillsets transfer between the stills and motion requirements and others are bespoke to specific parts of the VFX pipeline. We put together experienced teams that incorporate the disciplines and skillsets needed for the specific project. Much of the planning is problem solving the workflow and dividing up the tasks that can be run in parallel. Throughout the project there are peaks and troughs where teams will expand and condense and specific niche skills are added at key stages of the production. This includes specialist environment artists, concept artists, modelers, texture artists, particles and simulation skills, compositors and retouchers, riggers and animators, CG Supervisors, Leads and directors, producers and project managers as well as I.T and technical personnel looking after all the hardware, licensing and render management.  

Can you elaborate on the VFX pipeline and how your cloud-based model supports large teams?

Our remote-first pipeline is designed for seamless collaboration not only between teams and clients but across timezones. By utilizing our Amazon (AWS) cloud-based pipeline, we can bring teams of artists onto the same projects, no matter where in the world they are. For example on the snowballs, the animators, texture artists, and snow simulations can all work on the same shot simultaneously, from 3 different locations. We centralized file sharing and secure data storage make it easy for multiple artists to access scenes and shots at the same time, enabling synchronized workflows and the ability to dynamically scale to the needs of the job. It removes all rendering bottlenecks and system capacity, when you can simply spin up however many machines you need in an instant. 

How do you schedule and plan out so many moving parts of a production?

The timeline of any production has to be planned out meticulously, to avoid artist downtime and cost overruns, and to ensure we hit often immovable client deadlines. Each project has 3 schedules; an agency-facing schedule, incorporating key milestone sends and review dates that align with client availability and legal and regulatory reviews. A master studio schedule, to ensure it does not clash with other project deadlines, resources, or local holidays. Then a very detailed task-orientated schedule for all the artists, which is broken down into daily, sometimes hourly tasks. We live and breathe schedules, but we also know schedules live and breathe too, so they always need actively managing and adjusting throughout a production.