Anamorphic Stage Design: How Brands Use It For Advertising

When it comes to any form of advertising or marketing campaigns, the first goal is to create something interesting that grabs the audience's attention and gets them talking about your product. This creates an organic buzz, which makes them and others check it out and eventually leads to sales. However, with the advancement in technologies and increased competition in the market, brands are often fighting each other to get the attention of existing and new potential customers. While there are many technologies available, several brands have found making use of anamorphic stage design particularly useful.

What Is Anamorphic Stage Design?

Anamorphic stage design refers to designing a stage that uses visual content like videos, animations, or effects along with strategically placed screens to create an experience that gives viewers an illusion of depth, volume, and three-dimensional movement. The important thing to note about such stages is that, unlike conventional LED backdrop stages that are typically flat, an anamorphic stage can make use of single or multiple LED surfaces, corners, curved structures, or specially designed stage architecture to improve the illusion.

Thus, once the stage is set, the content is then rendered so that it perfectly aligns with the surface. This ensures that the content feels like it is popping out of the screen and, in many cases, even moving through multiple screens or extending beyond the stage.

How Does Anamorphic Stage Design Work

For an anamorphic experience to be successful, it is important that the physical stage and the digital content are created in a way that works with each other seamlessly. Here is how an anamorphic stage is commonly designed:

The first step in creating an anamorphic stage consists of determining the viewing perspective of the audience. This is very important as it can be used to decide the LED installation dimensions and scale it to match the size of the stage. Next comes the 3D content that is to be displayed. Typically, it is often a looping video or some form of animation. However, this content isn't a simple 3D animated video; rather, things like perspective, depth, lighting, shadows, motion, and camera positioning are carefully considered when it is made. This allows the digital visuals to perfectly align with the LED displays or the physical installation that is used.

Thus, when everything is set up correctly, an anamorphic LED display is capable of creating 3D visual objects that give the appearance of the content breaking out of the screen, products rotating or moving in seemingly impossible spaces, architectural structures expanding beyond the display, or characters interacting with the physical stage.

How Our Client Used Anamorphic Stage Design

Godrej City Panvel

Godrej City Panvel is a 145-acre project that offers buyers luxurious 3 & 4 BHK flats and over 30 amenities. But despite the countless features, the one challenge they faced that is also common for other real estate developers is selling a vision. They had to convince the buyers that they aren't just investing in a property but a future that consisted of airports, sea links, and economic hubs. Thus, they wanted to give their buyers an immersive experience instead of relying solely on traditional brochures.

The solution we came up with was an anamorphic stage that reframed the salesroom as a situational simulator. Thus, instead of using a passive pitch, we designed a tightly choreographed 3-minute group experience that proves the vision. The 3-minute journey was divided into 3 acts:

• Act 1: The Past - It showcased Godrej's legacy of delivered projects to establish trust and credibility.
• Act 2: The Present - The audience gets to see the current state of the under-construction towers.
• Act 3: The Future - This act is where the anamorphic content gets to shine as it presents the upcoming international airport, trans-harbour link, and film city in a manner that makes them pop out into the room. Ensuring that the audience gets a better understanding of the scale of the project while having an unforgettable experience.

The project had impressive results:

• 5400+ visitors processed per month.
• 15+ people capacity per session.
• 180 seconds of anamorphic content, which leads to full conviction.

Thus, to conclude, anamorphic stage design makes the most of physical architecture like LED displays and digital content like 3D animated videos to create a surreal experience that most people haven't seen before. It creates an optical illusion and gives depth and volume to content that makes for a memorable experience for the viewers. However, it only looks impressive when the anamorphic stage design is done right, from getting the perfect perspective, making the 3D content that aligns with the display, or calibrating the whole thing. Anamorphic content can be just as easily messed up as it can impress people. This is why you should use the services of a reliable agency that has experience with this technology. Fortunately, Ink In Caps is a MarTech agency that has multiple successful anamorphic projects to show, including Godrej City Panvel's hyper-real interactive 180-second immersion, Pampers' 3D anamorphic launch event, and MyTrident's anamorphic illusion wall. Contact us now to book a demo for your next anamorphic stage design campaign.