Our Challenge was to produce a live awards show annually for over 14 years, celebrating the best accomplishments in video games. We strive to create innovative new presentation styles to keep the 1.5-hour show unique yearly to surprise and delight the live audience of game-making studio heads, executives, and creatives.
DICE is the most respected show in the business, and that’s why we partnered with the Academy. The Awards are married to a week-long conference where industry leaders meet to exchange ideas about where gaming is going and the technology, partnerships, and craft that will take us there.
Our campaign lasting these 14 years has maintained the reverence this event deserves. We’ve produced the show in 5 different venues with 8 unique hosts who each brought their own flavor to the show. Each year we produce the show content, marketing materials, and executive production to maintain quality.
Here we opened the show with a live-action production in homage to the evening’s nominees. This production took us from world to world, visiting each character at the exact moment they received their nomination envelope. Our technicians cleverly deliver the nomination envelopes to each game character the best they can. These two are not the most athletic or competent, but they get the job done. As a creative partner, working with so many characters was an honor. We were fortunate to have good relationships with the studios and publishers that graciously contributed characters to the cause. There’s never been a commercial-level production of this scale with so many characters from different games coming together to tell a single story.
With an award show celebrating collaboration across borders, our inspiration became an opportunity of a lifetime. NoodleHaus created a project that truly crossed borders from North America to all over Europe and Asia. We conceived a plan to create a show that was made from the sketchbooks of all the member studios around the world. Our creative directors, producers, and writers plotted a course through the crafts employed in game-making. They then worked with game studio artists to sketch scenes that matched our story. We have scenes of connectivity, music composition, production management, adventure, and so on. The final result was a single video comprised of over a thousand drawings from famous artists around the world that celebrated the collaborative efforts of making a fantastic game worthy of a DICE nomination.
For the 20th anniversary of the DICE Awards, we decided to pay homage to every game-of-the-year winner from over the years. Our approach, we created art in a style and form that brought reverence to the important work that got us to the level we had achieved. We wanted to do so with a pretense of permanence. So we chose the sculpted works from history as our inspiration. Wonderful stories frozen in marble and granite, in the form of statues that lasted hundreds of years, were a message from the past to our future creators. This intro and show package was a clear message that our work and achievements over the past 20 years will stand the test of time.
The production crew went 100% head-first into this production. The effects in the film were done practically. The sculpture was real because we wanted a tangible, tactile experience with the concept. Building this as a CG model would have been too digital for our tastes, and more than a digital copy of a digital product was needed to honor these talented game makers. Looking at some of the behind-the-scenes footage, you can feel the sculpture’s gravity and scale and the fragility of its details.
Here we celebrate our similarities as artists with the great graphic artists from the 60s that constantly broke new ground with their techniques. Our team was inspired by classic film titles from years past and felt the DICE Award nominees were ready for a bit of fun. In this show, we rotoscoped characters of all the evening’s nominated titles to give every game a bit of recognition at the top of the show. Characters were diving, fighting, and flying from scene to scene with an upbeat presentation that had the crowd cheering for their favorites along the way.
Pete Holmes once said that we deserved an award for the best creative production at an awards show, and that’s Pete Holmes. Things just got real. Seriously now, each year, we create the best experience for those we’re honoring. This a unique assignment for an agency so driven by sales and impressions. Here, we are not measured by attendance or viewership. This show is more measured by viewer and board member feedback, audience engagement in the theater, and the overall impression the client and our team feel when it’s all said and done. After 13 years of return business, we hope our clients are happy with what they’ve received.
