Smarten Up Your City with IBM

There’s a famous saying that there’s no place like home. This statement probably means that people who care about the city they live in will be pleased to hear of a new initiative allowing them to positively transform their local area.

Mill+ and Ogilvy & Mather have produced the People 4 Smarter Cities project for IBM, to provide a forum for city dwellers and city leaders to work in collaboration, generating solutions and ideas on how city spaces can be used in a more beneficial way to produce positive change.

A film has been made to accompany a website where city people can interact. It was a collaborative process with one aim at its heart – to bring city people together.

"This project was a pleasure to be a part of, Ogilvy had a great script and it was our task to bring this to life. Using aspects of street art, we chose to narrate the piece with these expressive chapters and scenes. People were an important aspect of driving the message, so the idea was to capture real people coming together, interacting and working to share ideas and thoughts. Creating art was a positive, inclusive way to communicate this,” says Mill+ art director Phil Robson.

“The desire was to capture as much as possible within camera, so we went about creating laser cut mirror tiles that were placed onto the brick wall and huge chalkboard illustrations were drawn and then later animated in AFX. The collaborative process and smooth workflow in house was a dream too, from the production team to the after effects animation, nuke compositing, grade and 3D build of the leaf animations, each stage was a real team effort and joy to craft."