Project Overview.
After 50 years of revolutionising the mass spectrometry field, SCIEX reached out to Pebble Studios to discuss how best to capture and share their history and future. We needed to create an emotive, engaging and educational piece of content that positioned SCIEX as the leader in quantitative mass spectrometry analysis.
Story Development.
Pebble Studios developed a film treatment that would help elevate the series beyond the traditional ‘Scientific content’ being created in the industry. Taking narrative and visual cues from successful entertainment-led docu-series that blend engaging interviews and stunning b-roll footage with high end film making techniques and motion graphics.
Working with the SCIEX Marketing team we developed a story narrative that captured the character of the business and celebrated it’s rich history in Science and Innovation, highlighting key interviewees and archive assets and stories that would best visualise their stories.
With our overarching narrative approved, we held interviews with potential characters and finalised our talent for the production, bringing on board the superb Documentary Director, Paul Beauchamp, and a wider crew to handle the 5 day shoot in Toronto and Manchester.
Production.
Whilst the shoot team were on location capturing our footage, our design and animation team reviewed a huge archive of historical footage and imagery supplied from the SCIEX Vaults – highlighting key assets and developing design and animation treatments to help bring them to life as part of our story.
We developed a beautiful visual style for our archive assets with subtle parallax that gave dynamism to each shot, type treatments that represented the theme of our story and animations to help visualise more complex scientific explanations from the film.
Post Production.
With over 300 hours of interview and b-roll footage in the can from our shoot, we started by creating assembly edits of each of our interviews – ultimately creating 5 rough cut edits for each of our episodes.
With the shot footage locked off in edit, we began overlaying and cutting in our archive asset animations, transitions and titles animations to each of the episodes. To mirror the emotional tone of the films, we created bespoke music compositions to accompany the footage, before completing a full colour grade and final audio mix for the films.
The episodes premiered at SCIEX’s annual event and were met with overwhelmingly positive reviews. By blending high quality film making techniques with truly interesting and emotive stories from the Scientific community we had created a highly engaging series that would ‘stir the dying embers of young scientists around the world’.
