Few events bring the talent, the turn-out and the drama quite like the MTV Video Music Awards. Framestore worked with Beats by Dre for the 2013 bash, tasked with building and executing a real-time content system to ensure the hyper-relevant brand could engage with the show’s massive live audience as the evening’s performances and speeches played out.
Framestore was tasked with creating a real-time puppeteering system that would allow full live control of the Pill characters, and to assist with all aspects of the ensuing social media dissemination. The instant clips and videos turned out by the content system were voiced by a host of comedians (Neal Brennan, Corey Holcomb and Tichina Arnold), who gathered at Framestore’s New York HQ to riff and write material for widespread use across Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, Instagram and Vine.
On VMAs night, the full team crammed into the office: Beats’ social media gurus, the comedians who would spark the content, Framestore’s puppeteering machine and a Blackmagic capture set-up, working in sync to propel instant uploads in line with the live talking points of the event. We hired our own paparazzi to be on the red carpet at the actual awards show in Brooklyn, in an official capacity, so that we could get fairly instant images of celebs arriving. We were getting the images to Framestore within 10 seconds, allowing us to create content in this way. The other key part of the team on the night were our After Effects and Photoshop wizards. These guys had some serious pressure to turn around the captured content, in the correct format, to be uploaded directly to all of the Beats accounts.
