Monday, September 18, 2023
Following the amazing news that Ride Shotgun has acquired Creative Content Works we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce them and tell you a bit more about the acquisition. This isn't just an upgrade, it's a game-changer. Together, we're crafting a new narrative, one that propels Ride Shotgun into a new era. With the combined strength and resources of Ride Shotgun, Creative Content Works and Set Visions, we are rapidly becoming one of the UK's biggest independent content production juggernauts.
What this means:
- Ride Shotgun is still your go-to for joined-up brand journeys
- Expect an expanded range, complete with CGI and technology driven solutions
- Our team's growing, bringing together more experts in Interior Styling, Creative Strategy, Art Direction, 3D Modelling/Artistry and more.
We're super excited about being even better equipped to create stand-out campaigns and content to help build your brand.
Rest assured, we're the same great people - with the same mission - just with more hands on deck! Our focus on delivering seamless joined up brand journeys with a team of experts at every stage.
About Creative Content Works
Creative Content Works have a simple philosophy… produce great content, at speed and scale, delivered by experts. They’re a passionate team of creative thinkers and tech innovators. Building powerful partnerships with brands, solving creative challenges for a digital future.
Watch our Showreel
Take a look at our shiny new showreel showcasing some of our best work from the world of home interest and interiors, FMCG and drinks.
Curious? Contact the studio to discuss our end-to-end strategic, design and production capabilities.
Friday, September 8, 2023
Drumroll, please...
We’re absolutely thrilled to share some fantastic news: the Ride Shotgun family is growing with the exciting acquisition of the tech-savvy CGI team at Creative Content Works, currently based in Manchester and Sofia, Bulgaria.
Together, we’re combining our strengths to form one of the largest independent CGI Production companies in the UK. The addition of CCW’s expertise further enhances our commitment to delivering seamless joined-up brand journeys with a team of now over 160 experts at every stage. In short, we’re hoping it’s going to be a real game-changer!
Mark Mallinder, CEO of Ride Shotgun commented:
“After the successful acquisition of Set Visions last year, we recognised the growing significance of CGI as part of our business proposition. We have long admired CCW’s tech-driven approach to CGI production and are delighted to be able to complete this acquisition. CCW is a brilliant fit with our existing team, both culturally and operationally, so we’re really excited to see what we can achieve together.”
Production Director of CCW, Dimitar Dimitrov, added:
“Joining the Ride Shotgun team has been an exciting journey, and our teams are already working well together to drive both businesses forward. With our rich heritage in tech-driven CGI content and Ride Shotgun’s established brand and creative capabilities and broader proposition, we find ourselves in a unique position to deliver high-quality content, cost-effectively, and at unparalleled speed and scale.”
In this new partnership, creativity meets innovation, and the possibilities are boundless. So, buckle up, and enjoy the Ride!
Interested in knowing more? Contact the studio to discuss the Ride Shotgun group's extensive strategic, design and production capabilities. Tuesday, July 11, 2023
As competition heats up in the online world, it’s vital for brands to use every tool in the box to help them to stand out. Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has been around in films for decades, but it’s increasingly popping up in advertising and marketing too.
There’s certainly a lot for marketers to be excited about with CGI. Transform your marketing, future-proof your business and engage prospects and existing customers in ways you never could before.
Furniture giants like IKEA, Dunelm and John Lewis use CGI across over 50% of their sites. They’re not alone. A growing number of businesses across almost every sector are embracing CGI to tempt content-hungry customers and generate extra revenue. Customers have an increased appetite for enriched experiences and personalised products. And this hunger is set to continue in the ever-immersive digital world.
Online shoppers now expect brands to let them interact with quality stills, videos, and innovative solutions like augmented reality and product configurators. Multiply this content by numerous SKUs; that’s a mind-boggling volume of content, complex logistics and extensive costs.
CGI might just be the solution you’ve been looking for. Hallelujah! But if you’re new to CGI, knowing how to weave it into your marketing, comms and merchandising might seem intimidating, costly or complex. We get it. And we got you.
Check out the full article, exploring the advantages and capabilities of CGI in Ecommerce over at our partners site, Ride Shotgun.
Monday, June 19, 2023
Check out this incredible showcase of our CGI team's technical finesse in the world of fabric creation.
Using supplied material scans and references, our talented CG artists brought the fabric to life in stunning 3D, meticulously adding woven details for an organic flow. Our in-house team took a photographic approach, paying close attention to composition and lighting to achieve the photorealistic images.
The outcome? A delighted client who wanted to put our realism capabilities to the test, all without the hassle of physical samples reaching the shores of the UK!
No matter what material you envision, whether it's fabric or any other substance, we possess the expertise to transform it into reality!
Contact the team for more information.
Tuesday, June 13, 2023
From juicy burgers to seductive ice creams and flawless fruit and veg, delicious and realistic food CGI (computer generated imagery) product shots are everywhere. Now a staple tool in advertising and marketing, CGI ‘foodography’ is transforming the way brands showcase their products creatively and innovatively.
There are still many scenarios where stunning traditional food and drink photography can’t be beaten but there are plenty of pros of CGI. It allows us to generate otherwise impossible food imagery and push creative boundaries to the limits.
Over at our partner's site, Ride Shotgun we’ll look at the benefits of using CGI to create food asset libraries, TV ads or packshot visuals, plus find out from our CGI experts how this delicious imagery is created.
Thursday, May 18, 2023
Being part of the Ride Shotgun group means we can constantly keep new consumer behaviour in our side mirror. Producing fresh and fearless strategy, creative and content that’s relevant to our target market. And we want you along for the ride.
For the 2023 Interior Trend Report we’ve gathered industry insight and tapped into our stylists’ expertise to bring you the latest looks for 2023 and 2024.
The top trends you’ll read about in this edition are:
- Confident colour
- Larger than life lighting
- Eco-friendly interiors
- Make way for mushrooms
- Mythical magnetism
To receive this free resource, simply pop over to Ride Shotgun, fill in the form and download!
Tuesday, May 16, 2023
AI (Artificial Intelligence) has become increasingly popular in marketing as technology advances. While it can improve efficiency, accuracy, and the overall effectiveness of marketing campaigns, understanding exactly how marketing agencies currently use AI might be less clear.
In this blog, we’ll answer some of the key questions our clients are asking and lift the lid on how and why we use AI to benefit our clients, campaigns and projects.
What can AI do for marketeers?
The AI systems available to us cover a wide range of uses. Some have a very focused output, while others have the ability to be applied to much broader uses. These areas are particularly relevant to our industry:
- Image generation and manipulation based on text input
- Writing generated from questions and requests
- Generating basic code from text input for task automation
- Generate 3D models from text or single image input.
AI How we use AI
At Ride Shotgun, we don’t believe AI holds all the answers, but it can enhance the creative process and sometimes helps us to solve clients’ challenges faster. Our use of AI tools is always driven by a desire to produce quality content more quickly and communicate ideas more clearly. Here’s how.
Bringing the big ideas to life
Traditionally, presenting a new concept to a client involves collating lots of visual references to take them on the journey and give them a flavour of the idea. Working up a big idea (from the brains of our team’s genius creative minds) into multiple visuals can take significant time, budget and resources. If the idea isn’t selected and progressed, that’s potentially lost time, budget and resources.
Check out the full blog, exploring the advantages and potential pitfalls that this digital realm presents over at our partners site, Ride Shotgun.
Thursday, March 16, 2023
The Otto Group is one of the world’s biggest ecommerce companies. Based in Hamburg, Germany, they operate in more than twenty countries.
They approached Set Visions, Ride Shotgun’s CGI team, to potentially add to their core base of content suppliers for an ever-growing catalogue of ecommerce sites. The vast amount of visual content required for their numerous retail brands means that an overview production framework must be adhered to by each CGI supplier.
EXPECTED
For this test project, the client was looking to utilise AR (Augmented Reality) as an extra sales tool for customers to visualise a range of sofas from the comfort of their own homes. Our task was to produce-accurate 3D sofas in multiple iterations of different materials, colours, orientations and sizes. Totalling in a whopping 3,000 AR model assets.
Already a big enough challenge, we then discovered that the only technical specifications provided were in the form of raw spreadsheet data, with no photography, RBG colours or product web links.
EXCEEDED
Our Dev team wrote a custom script that cleverly loaded the web page of each product in the spreadsheet by constructing it from the SKU data, downloading the JPEG colour swatch and sampling it to get the sRGB data. Then writing this back into our Google sheet for later reference. On review, the client decided that we couldn’t rely on the accuracy of their own web colour swatches, and so they wanted colour to be referenced from the product photography from their website.
To achieve this, we created another custom script to download the hero image from each product web page, this provided a facility to mimic Photoshop colour sampling to capture an average RGB colour which was automatically registered on the Google sheet.
Thanks to this custom process, what would have taken days in Photoshop, now took mere hours for users to sample and record the colour of 3000+ sofas, group them by fabric type and create base textures of these materials.
Our custom script allowed us to take the appropriate base model (from a range of 50+), orientate it, apply the correct fabric and colour and the generate a ‘low poly’ model to be exported to Android or Apple file formats. These were validated against technical criteria to produce a 3D render of the model.
This was then fed in our custom testing app, which cross-reference the render to product photography. A simple keypress enabled the user to approve or reject it, with everything automatically fully tracked on the spreadsheet.
Having successfully delivered on our maiden project for The Otto Group, look out for more CGI collaborations in 2023…
Monday, February 20, 2023
FIRST UP, WHAT DOES “TIER TWO” MEAN?
You probably already have a strategic above-the-line agency, who has been primarily appointed to define your longer term brand ambition and marketing strategy.
However, what we have learned is that when it comes to subsequent brand, marketing and content initiatives that sit under the lead proposition, these agencies can often be very costly and slow to respond. Your budget is blown before year-end with perhaps little to show for it.
That’s where Ride Shotgun come in – as a TIER TWO agency – specifically designed to answer strategic, creative and content production briefs in an agile and cost efficient way, with highly effective results.
Check out how finding the right balance between strategy, creativity, and your content production budget is having your cake and eating it.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Set Visions render automation service produces endless product visualisations quickly and cost-effectively. Our bespoke service provides essential content for e-commerce retailers and product configurators. Colours and finishes can be quickly changed, with interior design updates to match.
1000s of product combinations are rendered automatically driven by our bespoke production code. The software uses spreadsheet data when connecting to our render manager, distributing the tasks to our render farm. By removing manual input, we can reduce the unit costs for our customers.
Ecommerce is a highly competitive market. Savvy online shoppers are turned off by low-res swatch shots, and the infamous phrase "also comes in..." Our service helps convert your online shoppers to purchase with our high-resolution product images.
The volume rendering service is a brilliant solution for product configurators or creating an 'asset bank' for multi-channel marketing campaigns, with fresh visuals every time.
To discuss how our batch rendering and configurator service can improve your eCommerce offering, contact sales@setvisions.co.uk to arrange a friendly, informal call or in-person meeting.
