TRX Sizzle

I directed and animated this 30s sizzle animation at Grizzle Animation Studio, alongside motion designer Alex Boyce.

What is TRX?

TRX is an online deal-making tool. It gives customers access to buy TV rights to thousands of hours of shows.

Let’s put that into context; imagine you owned a TV station and you decided you wanted to show “Game of Thrones” on your station, normally you would have to contact HBO by phone or email and hope they replied.

TRX has a platform where station owners can buy the rights without having to contact people direct. Its all laid out, contracts and all.

What I was asked to do

I was asked to design, storyboard and produce a 3D animation which could communicate this – all within 30s. In the marketing game they call this a sizzle or a sizzler. Its not a type of sausage at all. In fact, its a short & sharp way of advertising a product. The animation is exactly 30s in length making it perfectly suited to television advertising. 

Design reference

This came in the form of old TV idents. I was over the moon at this – TV idents are a motion designers dream. It was great trawling some of the old classics that I’d grown up with.

Unfortunately, due to rights laws we couldn’t show graphics of the shows that TRX has on the platform. Instead we carefully selected stock images that eluded to different genre of shows.

How it was done

I used Cinema 4D for pretty much everything. The rendering was done using Octane, which is so good it feels like cheating. When you compare it to the native renderer in C4D its a world apart in terms of speed and quality.

In the middle we had to show a user browsing the TRX platform on a computer to find the shows they need. We made the graphics in Adobe Illustrator and then animated them in After Effects. This meant we could time the GUI animations perfectly to fit the whole piece.