Big Farmer: Simplygon GDC Immersive Trailer

For these immersive showcase projects, debuted at GDC in 2022 and 2023, Big Farmer, a Keywords Studio, created beautiful landscapes and explorative narratives that would illustrate how Simplygon’s technology works in the world of games.

The Challenge

Simplygon were looking for a creative way to showcase their technology to the games industry at GDC. The challenge they gave to the Big Farmer team was to present two different technical tools – a modular content optimiser and a quad reducer - in a format that would be easily digestible and yet still eye-catching to the viewer.

The Solution

Firstly, our team developed a thorough understanding of both the Simplygon brand and the technical tools to be showcased, before getting to work on creating a vision for this piece. We leaned into storytelling as a vehicle for showcasing the tools and decided that we wanted to bring some fun and character to the video to help draw in the audience of game makers at GDC. We devised the idea where Poly, the Simplygon mascot, would be strolling through a museum where their different tools would be explained as they were encountered, as if parts of an exhibition. With beautiful visual environments and a little animated mischief worked in, the trailer would catch audience attention and invite them to learn about how Simplygon tools could work for their games.

The Process

In order to create a unique environment like the museum we built for Simplygon, we pull from extensive online libraries and marketplaces to grab a variety of models, textures and megascans that we assemble together into a realistic looking environment. From here, we now have a custom environment for us to start placing actors, cameras and lights into - ensuring that we have complete control over story and performance as Poly shows off the power of the Simplygon products.

Once we had the foundations of the visuals in place, our Animators jumped in, making all movements beautiful and eye-catching using custom built control rigs in Maya.

We then exported all animations for our Cinematic Artists to implement into engine and begin Set Dressing where we sprinkle additional assets into the scene to give it extra life and texture. Then we designed and configured lighting for the piece, to set the mood and really start making the shots look amazing.

Finally, we rendered the shots in high quality and handed them over to our fantastic Editors and Audio Designers to bring everything together into a final video.

Services included:

Unreal engine development
Environment and scene creation
Character and environment animation
VFX compositing
Custom particle systems
Custom lighting and cinematics

“We have worked with Big Farmer for many years, making several trailers and the collaboration has always been so smooth. Because we’re engineers, we like to think that we have great ideas for how to show things off but Big Farmer brought real expertise to this. Whatever they have produced has always surpassed my expectations. Our collaborations over the last years have led to the latest instalment, which we call ‘The Museum’. We told Big Farmer the features we needed to show off and shared the tech knowledge we had to support this, but ultimately just trusted them to create a video that shows these off in the best way. I think Big Farmer delivered on visualising a deeply technical product in a way that is easily digestible at a glance.”

Samuel Ranta-Eskola

Principal Program Manager at Microsoft