Pliops Extreme Data Processor Launch Event

Pliops was launching the XDP, its Extreme Data Processor, and built their announcement around a virtual event. The video was the event. It had to introduce the company, explain a piece of data center hardware most of the audience had never heard of, carry testimonials from customers, investors, and industry voices, and hold attention for the better part of half an hour.

Pliops brought in Gorilla Creative, a corporate video production company in San Francisco, to produce it. The finished launch video ran about thirty minutes across nine chapters, filmed in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Tel Aviv, and built around a deck's worth of custom motion graphics and animation.

The Challenge

The deadline was the launch day. Which meant the whole project had to be produced in about eight weeks from signed scope to delivery. Nothing about that date could move.

Inside those eight weeks sat a full script to shape, two production days on two continents, a speaker lineup spread across several companies, and a technical deck that had to become engaging animation. A thirty minute video with that many dependencies is really nine projects that all have to come together seamlessly at once.

Our Approach

We built the launch video in sections and scoped it that way from the start, so Pliops could see exactly how each part of the video mapped to the work behind it. That structure did more than keep the scope transparent. It let sections move through script, filming, graphics, and review on their own tracks instead of waiting on each other.

Post production started before we filmed anything. As soon as the script and the reference deck were locked, our editors and motion designers took an inventory of every illustration, chart, and data point that had to become a graphic, then worked out how each one should be brought to life.

The first version Pliops reviewed had all of those graphics in place but still static. That let them approve the interviews, the pacing, and the placement of every graphic before we spent an hour animating. Once it was signed off, we animated the builds and timed them to the delivery of the script.

We filmed two days on green screen in a Bay Area studio, fully scripted and on teleprompter so the presenters could look straight down the lens and concentrate on their delivery performance. For the origin story and the wrap-up we went to Tel Aviv, where we researched, vetted, hired, and directed a local crew to film on the beach, so the footage cut together with everything else as if one team had filmed all of it.

The Outcome

Pliops went live on schedule with a launch video that did the job of a keynote. The company, the origin story, the product reveal, the technology, the customer and investor voices, and the case for why any of it matters, all in one piece they could send to a prospect, an investor, or a candidate afterward.

Two of the sections went on to work as standalone videos after the event, which is the quiet advantage of building a long video in parts.