Dentrix Business of Dentistry Conference

We have been working with our client Dentrix/Henry Schein now for about two years, usually fairly straight forward work tended to support their sharp group of internal creatives and developers - flash banners, programming email templates, some minor web dev consultation (.Net), etc. In that time and through that work, however, we have gotten to be pretty good friends with several of our direct clients over there. They have allowed us to be bold on occassion and pitch things that would allow us to stretch our skills and maybe stretch their brand a little bit in the process.

This video is one of those occassions. The initial brief was to do a short flash animation that introduced the several main items of import for the target audience (Dentists and their office employees) leading up to their annual Business of Dentistry Conference that takes place in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the prior year, they built the video internally with the premise of a car racing through the desert on the highway heading to the big show in Vegas. They still liked that idea conceptually (heading to Vegas for the show), but wanted to see if it was possible to do something in 3D. We were willing to do something for them in 3D, but didn't feel that it would deliver them exactly what they were hoping, in addition to the higher budget and longer create time. We came back with a bit of a compromise that we hoped would make them happy, allow us to push the envelope a bit, and still let them keep the budget under control.

We ended up doing the whole thing in After Effects with the 3D objects added in via Cinema 4D. Ryan Lewis, our CD on this, delivered the Vector Images to Mike Terrell, our Animator and Art Director, who brought them into After Effects as layers. With the addition of the 3D objects, the overall quality got a boost that we wouldn't have been able to deliver as quickly in Flash. In effect, our compromise was to use a 2 1/2D environment (basically 2D planes within a 3D space) rather than dedicating ourself to only one.

In the end, this was one of our more fun projects we have worked on recently.