Jay Jays Dance-Off 3D

The campaign formula has remained similar for apparel company Jay Jays for some time. Traditionally a printed catalogue, perhaps some TV, new price points and store design, some photos of each outfit on the Jay Jays website and some eye-catching window-designs in the many Jay Jays stores across the country. But that’s all changed.

Jay Jays approached Visual Jazz in 2009 with key insights that their customers are consuming less print, watching less TV, and engaging with more fun, social content online. Jay Jays have a great handle on their brand and a solid, loyal relationship with their customer base – they have over 40 thousand Facebook fans and as such, a growing online focus.

The Jay Jay’s Dance Off 3D campaign is a first for Jay Jays and it’s focus is online engagement, entertainment and of course showing off the new Jay Jays range. Visual Jazz has worked with the brand to create an immersive and exciting new experience that really needs to be experienced to be fully appreciated. It launches alongside an entirely new Jay Jays website filled with customer engagement opportunities and barrels of fun.

Here’s how we went about the Dance-Off online campaign element…

A casting call was put out for dancers with unique skills of differing backgrounds. Two busy days of auditions took place and 9 dancers were chosen. We ended up with the following range of performers…

• a robot popper
• a ribbon dancer
• a jazz dancer
• a salsa dancer
• a ballet dancer
• a freestyling locker
• a breaker
• a arcrobat
• and a ballroom dancer

Jay Jays are a brand with diversity, inclusion and freedom of expression at it’s core. The chosen dancers represent a wide range of styles, backgrounds, age-groups, attitudes and ethnicities.

Shooting took place over one grueling day in an amazing warehouse in the Melbourne CBD. Two of the many spaces in the warehouse were decked-out and fully crewed for two distinctly different shoots. One was for stills, with shots to be used in store window displays, on price-points, and other predominantly offline collateral. The other contained a 3D video camera rig to capture the motion that was to be used in the online execution. The dancers came in and out throughout the day and performed brilliantly within both areas on a tight schedule. Costume changes took place after both locations had their fill of sweet moves and they did it all again.

The Jay Jays Dance-Off 3D campaign shows Jay Jays new range of winter street clothes in a fresh light in an interactive and entertaining way. You can mix your own edit of dancers, or sit back and watch the master edit play out. And at all times you are able to pause the action and explore each dancer’s outfit in detail.

Ultimately we had 20 videos to cut for the full campaign. One solo video for each of the 18 outfits was created, and two main edits that appear on the dedicated site and YouTube utilising the new features of the YouTube 3D video player.

All items of clothing were tracked in each frame of every video. Clicking your mouse or pressing space bar while a video is playing brings up a still image allowing users to explore the outfits in detail and save still frames and wallpapers.

The 3D component adds a real wow factor to this campaign. Interacting with the videos and watching the dancers presents a really fun experience on it’s own, but I feel like we’ve really stepped it up by having everything in 3D. The process has presented many more challenges than expected and it’s been a real learning experience, but the re-burgeoning nature of this technology was too exciting to leave out. After many headache’s and late nights, Visual Jazz are extremely proud to present Jay Jays Dance Off in 3D.

Check out the Visual Jazz Blog for more info on the project