We first started work on Eighteen in 2015, when International Design Group brought us in to create some animation for their golf course design. The project went quiet for a couple of years until a new developer took over and asked us to continue where we had left off.
The brief was to show more of the golf course along with the rest of the project, including a hotel, shopping mall, offices, clinic, mosque, parks, cricket pitch, apartments and villas. The project resembled a small city.
We created a library of short animations showing every part of the project. Our thinking was these could be repurposed to give the developer plenty of flexibility for their marketing. They could select a single animation or combine two or three to create a teaser and introduce a particular part of the project. The animations could be combined with filmed footage, graphics and a voice over to form a marketing video. Or they could be run together to create a compilation, showing the entire project. This is exactly what happened, and the developer certainly made good use of the animations we created.
The animation library was updated regularly over the course of a year to include additional parts of the project, and the animations were used at launch events in Islamabad, Dubai and London.
For the launches we also created a virtual reality (VR) experience so potential buyers could immerse themselves in the project. For example, someone interested in a villa could stand on the terrace and look all around them, seeing their view of the golf course in front of them and the interior of their villa behind them.
In addition to the animations and VR, we also created CGIs that were used on the project website, social media, brochures and large format billboards.
This was certainly one of our most challenging projects, simply due to its size and the amount of modelling and rendering required. But we were determined not to let this inhibit our creativity. This meant a lot of planning, testing, upgrading our render farm, and in some instances rethinking our workflow. It also helped that our client, the developer, showed a lot of trust in what we do, giving us a great deal of freedom and artistic licence.
The animation was viewed 366,000 times in less than 3 months.