Full Mental Jacket Founder Ronen Lasry on Producing Full Interactive Real-time Graphics for That Morning Show

That Morning Show, which airs for three hours daily, Monday-Friday, on E! Entertainment Television is one of the first live programs to incorporate real-time graphics.  

Full Mental Jacket produces the full graphics package for That Morning Show, including virtual sets, the main title opening sequence and on-air graphics. Concurrently, Full Mental Jacket produces live, 90-second, interactive segments entitled “CHASEit," which occur four times an hour, covering a range of sponsors and replacing traditional commercial breaks. These segments utilize the interactive format by featuring special call-in offers and discount codes. Because CHASEit segments occur in a virtual environment, the look and feel and scrolling text can all be updated as easily as a Web page, resulting in far less cost for producer and sponsor.

Speaking with Studio Daily, Full Mental Jacket Founder and Executive Creative Director Ronen Lasry explains the advantage of virtual environments over traditional commercials and how Full Mental Jacket applies a newsroom mentality to virtual branding.

 
Watch clips of the virtual environments here and here.
SD: How did the company’s progression to working on CHASEit come about?
RN: We’ve been doing virtual sets for 10 years; we’ve worked for CNBC, NBC, FOX…and a host of other broadcasters and networks, both here in the US and internationally. We’ve done a lot of work with virtual environments—probably more than anyone else in the country as a creative design company.
This is the first time that we’ve done this kind of project, which was to create branded environments, which you could compare to 3D Second Life-type worlds. So, for instance, in Second Life, you can go in and build a Gap store that represents the brand. This was the same sort of thing, but for Television and at a much higher quality level.
Where did you look for inspiration to design the CHASEit environments, which cover a ranage of brands?
We mostly looked to the brands themselves. We’d talk to the brand managers, along with the brand bibles, and have conversations with them about how things should look or how to use their brand. One of the things that inspired us most was, if there was a brick and mortar store, we would pay close attention to the window displays. The window display is the place in the store where they try to express themselves three-dimensionally.
 
That was for stores with physical store presences. For shops like Zappos or Amazon that are online only, we actually found a lot of inspiration in their banner ads and ad campaigns. We took a lot of really bright punch graphics and found that they translated really well into a 3D world.
 
What kind of software to you use to create the environments?
It’s the same exact technology that CNN employs for graphics and holograms and 3D broad shots.  It’s not exactly the same software…the software that we use primarily is called Brainstorm. It’s the same one that’s being used at NBC, but it’s the same principles behind what’s used at CNN and FOX.

The software is a real-time rendering software so it’s kind of like a high-end game engine. We can take in things like RSS feeds and AP feeds and newslwire feeds and just like they would in any kind of elections coverage. Statistical data. And render those things and basically design those information graphics. A lot of the work we do is news. For news sets, where they want a ticker from the headlines on their web site play in the virtual set, we set up a ticker in the set.

 
Something that would be a million or half million dollar feature in a set, we add in virtually—to give them the same sort of over-the-top expensive look.
 
It’s also like turning a Web page into a 3D world because everything can be dynamic and live.

What are some of the advantages of 3D environments over traditional commercials?
One thing they allow us to do is embed a lot of current information. For instance, for Chili’s, we put a coupon code in the virtual set—every day we can put a different code. Or, we can run specials.

 
People are comforted by getting the sense of an environment.
IBC’s pitch to us was, we want to make live-TV commercials. Instead of having Amazon spending a million or five million on a commercial, where you shoot it once and you play it over and over and over again…and the message has to be generic in a way—the idea here is  to do more iterative commercials and to make the message more timely and updated. The reason we like the virtual set technology is that we can make the whole environments in a very cheap way be dynamic and changing—and do it all in a very small studio space with minimal crew.
 
Where’s the physical set?
The studio is in Irvine, CA, where they have a typical hard set for shooting That Morning Show. Then we have two virtual, greenscreen stages where we shoot. It essentially boils down to one operator and one camera person

That’s quite a contrast to a full commercial production…

We have graphics people on our side who’re producing all the graphics, but in terms of actual production: it’s shot live and there’s no post processingn, no compositing after. We shoot it live. We track it live. We composit and render live. Everything’s done in real time.
 
 
Do you have many more projects of this type in the pipeline?
We’re doing a lot more of the interactive projects now. The big things that we are always aiming for are election packages, the big cheese for this kind of work because they have to be impressive and splashy, but also, up-to-the-second and dense with information and graphics.

Internally, we just finished a show for CNBC, Business of Innovation, that just went on the air and a couple others.