We Are Chapeau Studios

Chapeau Studios approaches content as a source of connection - to stories, brands, stylistic expressions, and raw emotion. A multidisciplinary production and design studio, Chapeau weaves creative thinking and user experience ideas into solutions we develop for our clients. This is driven by our integrations of technology, traditional media, and unending curiosity.

Chapeau Show Reel

Dynamic Displays

Bubbles - Apple

Fish - Apple

Apple - Bursts

Apple - Butterflies

Apple - Flowers

Short Jellyfish Stringout

Ink Tank Stringout - Apple

Blobs - Apple

Product Videos

Apple - Watch Series 2

Apple - iPhone 7

Apple - Macbook Pro

Apple - iMac Retina 5k

Apple - iPad Pro Launch

Apple - Apple Pencil

Personalized Videos

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INTRODUCTION

Since Facebook first announced Friends Day in 2015, they have generated millions of unique videos for connected Facebook friends around the world. Dynamic content brings personalized social media to an unprecedented level of visual engagement. At their core, Facebook’s personalized videos marry traditional film production with the digital medium of personal, user-generated content. Chapeau was at the forefront of helping Facebook create this process.

The videos began as an experience focusing mainly on the most visible content type on the platform: user images. The creative ask at the time was to populate user-generated photos into a short film format. Facebook wanted to use high-resolution, high-design, practically-shot live footage to achieve an organic, material quality in their films that is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to convey using purely CGI video techniques. Guided by our mission to help Facebook execute their vision, Chapeau’s research and development process identified a need: we had to design a way to create a simplified data output from a streamlined base video project file. Developing this new data parameter and slim-layer templates from complex Dynamic video files became a core challenge our technical artists would solve.

Over the course of several video concepts, additional dynamic content types became entwined with story, which continually presented unique challenges to an already complicated workflow. Chapeau was able to bridge creative and technical disciplines, iterating with Facebook engineers to identify and build a high-end, 3-layer compositing process designed to render quickly while maintaining Facebook’s high production standards. Less layers means smaller files and faster turnaround to more individual users. Essentially, smaller file sizes enable more sharing; sharing builds community, which is what Facebook is all about.