Ollie Allgrove

Make the Impossible possible 

We were fortunate enough to have been visited by Ollie Allgrove, an Executive Producer, who works for a company called the mill:  http://www.themill.com

The Mill is the world's largest post production company in advertising and is respected for high end visual effects and moving image, design and digital projects for the advertising, games and music industry. The company is highly respected and is recognised for being the most awarded company in advertising; for example, the company won an oscar for their set design for Gladiator.

Ollie Allgrove originally studied english and graduated with an english degree from university. He then realised that he was interested in the media side of things and started off as a runner. He stressed the importance of throwing yourself in there if you want to go into the media world, and how being a runner is the best thing he could have done. He also said that making a promo music video is another great way to start and build up a showreel for other potential jobs.
We were shown many examples of The Mill's work and projects he had worked on. The first was an SSE energy advert :

When the idea first came to mind, there were many problems that immediately occurred. One of the main ones was that you can't use animals anymore for media purposes, so CGI was an immediate cause to the problem. To try and create an effective and realistic piece of CGI, there must be a lot of time and effort put into it. This is what The Mill ended up doing. They observed the animals for 9 months, long at characteristics and movement, and then created a CGI image of the animal. It was crucial to go into this much detail to ensure the animal looked as believable as possible.

The Treatment : The treatment is structured to land the job so it is important to ensure this perfectly describes your image. Make sure you hook them right from the beginning. The Treatment has to have a voice even though this can sometimes be challenging. Ollie also warned that sometimes it is very hard to be able to speak on paper, and it is a skill that must be learnt to ensure you land the job.

Another example of a video they worked on was Wide Open by the Chemical Brothers. This video in particular was one of their more successful ones, raking in a view count of 15.5 million : 

This video took a long time to complete as the editing process had to be done very carefully to make sure that the CGI did not look unprofessional. Luckily, the track did not have any real budget as the company liked the track and was excited to create a video for it. However, it is important to remember that this is not only the case, and there are several videos that had little or no budget. Wide Open was shot in one continuous shot to help with the editing later as the editing was smoother. Here is a video to show the making of the video :