Behind the Game-Changing CGI Tabletop of This Mexican Studio
Ool Digital is a one-stop resource for tabletop productions in Guadalajara, Mexico, founded in 2008 by brothers Alvaro and Edgar Guizar. With the former studying business and the latter specialising in animation, the pair eventually joined forces and chose advertising as their avenue for success. Ool Digital quickly became one of the first Mexican companies to offer high-end CGI for big advertising projects - acquiring clients like Grupo Bimbo and various PepsiCo and Frito-Lay brands.
Through this work, Ool Digital developed a unique ‘CGI tabletop’ workflow - a combination of CGI and live action - that has become the company’s main service, among others like 3D and 2D animation, motion graphics, VFX and pre-production animatics. Building on this, Alvaro and Edgar partnered with Mango films and Steve Giralt, owner of The Garage in New York, in 2020 to start FFFRAME TABLE TOP in 2020, a visual engineering studio with innovation in tabletop at its core.
Ool Digital, Mango Films & FFFRAME, then teamed up with another like-minded business, Semillero Sound Design, to create ‘The Playground’, a physical end-to-end production hub that houses all of their capabilities, from a small creative team, through to its studios covering tabletop production, CGI and Dolby Atmos - as well as a fully-fledged production and production services unit for shoots that go beyond the table.
“We are all geared up with an industrial kitchen, we have a Phantom VEO 4K camera, we have a special effects team, we have rigs, Cinebolt and Bolt Jr robotic arms. Everything [is] in-house,” says Alvaro, speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway about the company’s latest developments. “This is the main difference - that we own everything.”
He explains that if most production companies in Mexico want to even do tests for tabletop ideas, they have to rent equipment and space for tabletop shoots, as well as hire a freelance crew to operate the robots. Ool Digital however, with its surrounding ‘Playground’ of tech and team members, has an entire laboratory ready at its disposal that Alvaro says allows them to research, develop and scale up its quality.
The CEO views the set-up as a “metro line”, where clients can jump aboard at any stage of the pipeline - from creative to production and post. However, the main goal is to bring more clients on to do the whole process. “Right now, we do 60% in pieces and 40% in whole, but our goal is to increase that because it’s easier and less painful,” he says. “The more layers and parties - the more complex the process gets.”
Explaining that the flow with a client is vastly improved if Ool can work from the inception of an idea, he adds, “When the creative comes from a director or another person, they don't always have the full understanding of the technology or the process and end up promising things that aren’t easy with that budget. So when we do a treatment and the creative, we know the budgets, the scope of the budget and the timeline that the client wants, and we build the idea within this triangle: quality, time and money.”
He continues, “We have been crafting our process for the last 10 years, and it’s been a very artisanal thing - to have the edges of a cookie look right when you crush it… there’s a lot of detail!” Creating new textures is always a particular challenge and requires significant research and development time. So, as well as experimenting with AI and enhanced GPU processing, Alvaro says Ool Digital recently acquired a new state of the art scanner, that allows for the replication of more photorealistic textures. This advancement allows the team to remove some of the challenges with replicating lighting and digitally emulating a food stylist’s work in CGI, which has been the method until this point.
The team always asks for clients to send ingredients lists, samples and cross-sections to the studio to be scanned and analysed - but this isn’t always possible, especially when the product quite literally doesn’t yet exist.
“We have to invent and visualise this non-existent product - which sometimes is very ugly - and we have to make it beautiful,” says Alvaro. “We are all in the lying industry. We have to lie perfectly.”
One such technique to make the most out of a product visually, involves filming on a super macro scale - something Ool employs regularly to unlock the different tastes and elements within a snack. “But the client also always wants to show the whole thing,” he adds. “You have to make it appealing. You have to make it very, very beautiful. So you have to find a way with angles, with the focus, with light etc. to make it more interesting.”
Fortunately, thanks to Ool’s combination of live action and CGI capabilities, many complex tabletop challenges can be resolved. For example, the team recently used a combination of water simulations and footage of a real bottle interacting with water to achieve a physically impossible visual for a juice brand. For Alvaro, striking a balance between CGI and live action can be difficult, but he says it’s important to take each shot on a case-by-case basis and determine which technique is easier, more cost and time effective, and provides the best visual.
“The key is the composition,” he says. “If it’s very easy to do a shot with live action, but the next shot is full CGI and won’t have the same look, then it's not worth doing it live action.” He continues, “When you put everything together, does it look like the same spot or like two different looks? That is always the more challenging thing - the assembling and compositing of both worlds.”
Becoming experts in this hybrid ‘CGI tabletop’ method has opened the doors to the international market for Ool Digital. While half of its clients come from Mexico, one of its biggest markets is the US, and it has also developed projects for Vietnam, Dubai, France, Spain and elsewhere in Latin America. Alvaro believes that Ool’s increasing global popularity is driven by its advantage of combining CGI and tabletop shooting, helping reduce timelines and budgets - as well as offering tests and previews thanks to its in-house equipment and crew.
While being around “20 to 30% more affordable than a company in the States or Europe” is certainly an attractive proposition on its own, he says that the true “game-changer” is the ability of the in-house team and its ‘Playground’ of tools to provide brands and agencies with treatments that include test visuals that feature the actual product, instead of just references from other spots.
“It’s given us so much advantage to come to treatments with tests already done,” he says. “To not say: ‘Imagine this’, but: ‘Look at this!’ And ‘look at the time frame we did this in’. So we really invest a lot in our projects.”
While Ool Digital continues to innovate with its hybrid technique, Alvaro refuses to focus just on the present. Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, he shares that there is a “drawer of future ideas” that he has ambitions of achieving sooner rather than later. As well as continuing to understand the aforementioned prospects of AI, he also has his eye on the potential of virtual production and Unreal Engine in the tabletop space.
But perhaps most importantly, Alvaro is also seeking to assist the next generation of Latin American talent, who may one day work at Ool Digital themselves. As well as partnering with a local university in Guadalajara to give night talks and arrange guest speakers, Alvaro says the company has opened its own programme to quickly train artists for the local industry - and hopefully combat the trend of foreign companies poaching the top Latin American talent.
“Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico all have very talented artists. We all grow up with English music and English movies, so we speak English… we’re attractive for American, Canadian and English companies,” he says. “Our goal this year and in the upcoming years is to sell more, and bigger, projects outside Mexico so we can charge in dollars, pounds or euros. That will give us the power to pay better salaries to our artists and hold them here.”
