How Analog Found Itself at the Forefront of Creative Visual Effects
Meet Analog. The creative visual effects studio has crafted commercials and experiences for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Mercedes, and Rolex, earned accolades from Cannes Lions, D&AD, British Arrows, VES, Bafta, and Royal Television Society, and even had its Sports Emmy-winning work shown on the mammoth screen of the Las Vegas Sphere.
But how did it get here?
Analog began as a one-man band in Liverpool, back in 2008. Armed with a background in architectural visualisation and the determination to do something different, founder Michael Merron sought out the people whose work he admired most to offer them his services. Building strong relationships with companies like 1stAveMachine New York and its directors, those connections propelled Michael’s move to London in 2010 – closer to the studios doing the work he wanted to do – as well as the assembling of Analog’s A-team.
First to join Michael as co-founder was Matt Chandler, then a CG supervisor and VFX technical director at Jellyfish. Co-owner Arvid Niklasson came next, from his post as Mainframe’s head of 3D. As a trio, they were quickly able to lock down head of 2D Fabio Zaveti from MPC, head of 3D Simon Reeves from The Mill, and later down the line, head of 3D Mark Jackson, who had previously worked at Saddington Baynes. With a quality line-up of key people, Analog was able to cover every skill, and blur the lines between design, direction, and post.
Above: Burberry ‘Hero’
“What’s quite funny about it is that we didn’t really all know each other,” notes Arvid. “Each person was selected because they were admired for their work.” To this, the team attribute a portion of their success: being essentially strangers, they entered into working relationships free of preconceptions. Arvid continues, “It was a lot of trust and it speaks to our collaborative nature. In a broader sense, that’s also how we see other companies. We try to integrate with them.”
Collaboration has been central to Analog from the very beginning: the trust granted to it by the esteemed directors and studios it partnered with early on helped make it what it is today. Even now, Analog favours casting egos aside in the interest of creating better work alongside its peers and competitors, as it has done with the likes of ManvsMachine and Nexus Studios.
That’s part of why Analog recently jumped at the chance to team up with two other like-minded companies under the banner of creative group, Further. Each working at the cutting edge of its own discipline, Analog handles creative, motion, and visual effects, Pixel Artworks tackles experiential, and DesignStudio does design and branding.
“We're not similar businesses,” says Michael, “so it can feel a little bit like you’re stepping out of a place of comfort, but that’s where the potential for growth is: we’re bringing a much broader, deeper breadth of expertise by coming at it from different points of view. And while we've got different ethoses, different clients, different ways of working, there is a common thread of quality design execution and wanting to go further.”
As a group of highly technical people with a love of design, the jobs that stand out over the years are the ones where they’ve had to problem-solve their way into what the creative become – “tactile problem-solving,” as Arvid puts it. “We’ve always liked the line between design, visual effects, and narrative, and our most successful projects have been the ones where that blend has really come together,” Michael adds.
Above: Mercedes Maybach ‘Welcome to Beyond’
Repeat collaborations with director Saad Moosajee have led to some of their best. “Saad is a very capable CG artist himself, which means he can spot all the tricks and always wants to push it further. It's nice and challenging to work on a project with someone who is so informed,” notes Michael.
Mercedes Maybach ‘Welcome to Beyond’ is one such collaboration with Saad. Two minutes of creative VFX places six luxury vehicles in six dreamlike worlds, which Analog designed, supervised and built in a combination of Unreal engine, AI, virtual production and traditional 3D/VFX. “We don't really care how it gets made – we'll turn our hand to it,” says Arvid. “Maybach was a great job because it utilised every single kind of tool, touched on so many different technologies, and all their output needed to be consistent to ensure everything fit together. It was a nice problem to try to solve.”
Above: UFC ‘Early Civilizations’
Another collaboration with Saad presented a different kind of problem. The project was titled 'Early Civilizations’, and formed the second chapter of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) 'For Mexico, For All Time' – which recently won two Sports Emmys for Outstanding Graphic Design – Specialty and Outstanding Studio or Production Design/Art Direction.
As part of Riyadh Season, it was shown inside the Las Vegas Sphere – an enormous, high-definition canvas that fills the audience’s field of vision at 270 degrees horizontally. “When you're creating content for a screen like that, that's narrative-based and that has to be composited – it's got live action, CGI, simulations, animations, 3D scans – there is quite literally nowhere to hide,” Michael emphasises. “If it's not perfect, it screams at you in a way that you never thought possible. You’re hit with the work you have to do to fix some of the problems that you can see as a supervisor. All different departments have to come together to work creatively.”
UFC was a stand-out campaign from a stand-out year for Analog, so how did they celebrate? They threw a stand-out Christmas party – with just the “perfect amount of danger,” in Michael’s opinion. Heading off to the Lake District to climb The Old Man of Coniston, they woke up to four feet of snow. Perfect for winter wonderland vibes, less perfect for climbing rocky terrain at high altitudes. “It was quite precarious. Some people climbed with plastic bags around their feet. When you're walking past climbers with crampons, you're like, ‘okay, we may be slightly underprepared,’” Michael remembers.
Still, it was one hell of a team-building experience. “It’s not easy when you’re walking for eight hours in snow up to your knee, but everyone was really engaged and decided to power through together,” Arvid remarks. “I’m so glad we came back with everybody that we took,” adds a relieved Michael.
Above: Photo from Analog's Lake District trip
With its team still intact, Analog can start planning its next ascent – thankfully more safely, via the work. Continuing to pursue short-form projects brings with it the excitement of getting to break new ground with each one, whether that’s with new technology, new creative tools, or something else entirely. It’s the driving force that has catapulted Analog forward for the past 17 years, and will now be facilitated with DesignStudio and Pixel Artworks by its side.
As it did with UFC, Michael wants to see Analog grow through servicing fringe design and experiential work in non-standard formats, to keep up with – and define – the changing ways people consume media. Arvid concurs: “We want to be known as the people that can turn to any type of media and format make work that’s outstanding creatively, unique, and high quality.” Find them at the forefront.
