My name is Doug Fidler, I’m the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of three award-winning agencies in DFW and London, producing experiential attractions, global & national advertising campaigns, activations for events, TV commercials, product launches, trade shows, conferences, sales tool development and aerospace design.

My personal skillset, drawn from over 20 years’ experience, is based on an understanding of all types of production, hardware platforms, software platforms, emerging technologies, design and production pipelines.

I studied video production, 3D animation and special effects at The London Institute of Art & Design. From there, I started my own small production company back in 1995 specializing in corporate communications, and after that I never looked back!

As Chief Creative Officer, I oversee all types of production, from VR/AR and web, to video, animation and special effects. I think a fundamental understanding of the total pipeline makes for the greatest videographers. Editing is key - I used to say “even if the content is ‘OK’ a good editor can make it sing”!

Sector 5 Digital works every aspect of marketing with a concentrated blend of master creative, strategic insight, and emerging technology. We leverage economic efficiency to deliver the extraordinary. Our joint team of brilliant creative and production minds work directly with our clients to create award-winning work that spans from conventional to radical.

Our production capabilities include:

Virtual Reality (VR)

Augmented Reality

Brand Activations

On-line and Mobile apps

Conferences and Events

Film & Video Production

Photography

Photo-realistic 3D Animation

TV Commercials

Interactive Game Technology

Impactful, unexpected, epic. Those are my watchwords. Establish an emotional connection - if we make our clients cry (and we have, many times) then we know we’re onto something!

We try to avoid doing more traditional video production. We’re always thinking about how to create truly inspirational pieces that use technology, 3D animation and special effects to really immerse people into the story. We always want to push the ‘wow’ factor whenever we produce anything for clients. The antithesis of ‘Death by PowerPoint’.

Our pub (seriously)! I lived in the UK for 42 years, and always had my best ideas in the local pub. Then I moved to Dallas where pubs are very scarce, so we actually built one inside our agency, where our creative team can grab a sofa and a beer and ideate crazy solutions. But our pub-based creation process only starts after in-depth discovery sessions with our clients and listening to their challenges and objectives. Then and only then do we grab an adult beverage and distill their challenges into viable marketing ideas.

It’s a very proud moment whenever we win prestigious awards such as this one. It validates our creativity and gives us all a well-deserved boost to our confidence, proving that our work is very well received not only by our clients (along with the success it brings them), but also within the industry. It’s always great to get recognition from a wider audience.

Many of our clients are global, iconic brands, so an international award helps both them and us receive wider recognition. Winning awards always helps us market our services – it's external validation that we do great work and shows the world we’re not just drinking our own Kool-Aid!

The vision for this trilogy of ultra high-definition videos was very ambitious to say the least. All the videos were 3D animated and used a combination of Unreal-Engine, Maya, After Effects and Premiere to create entire microscopic worlds beneath the skin, along with whimsical yet beautiful animations to represent aesthetic products. The time-frame was aggressive and it took a village to achieve the 20 mins+ of content by the client’s conference date.

Simply having the talent available was paramount to meet the aggressive deadline. In fact, artists from the UK helped our Dallas-based team to achieve the wonderful results!

Using real-time engines to render 3D worlds and create special effects has helped us accelerate production timelines. Only a few years ago we were rendering frames using our 120-server render-farm, which on average took around two hours a frame (and days to create shots) to render. Now, using real-time technologies, we’re rendering longer scenes in hours on one single PC using powerful NVIDIA graphics cards.

Using the latest technologies, we are able to provide our clients with Hollywood level quality at corporate rates. This frees up our creative teams to imagine crazy storylines and ideas while still achieving great results on tighter budgets. It means we get to have fun on all our projects!

Access to 3D Artists and motion graphics software helps get you to the next level. Beautiful composition and an understanding of cinematography, lighting, movement, etc. is a must, but when you mix that with new technologies, that’s when it gets crazy cool.

Further integration with real-time technologies is exciting for me. The ability to shoot scenes on a green-screen and see the composition in real-time helps us get better results instantly.

Our more innovative clients inspire me to do better work, pushing the boundaries even further and challenging us to create something that’s either never been done before or is at least on the leading edge. Without those visionary clients we wouldn’t be creating the work we are today. We aim to help our clients dream the impossible and then make it happen.

Never be satisfied with your first idea, always think about the next two levels above, the ultimate incarnation of the idea, and then take it further. You can’t always achieve the ultimate incarnation, but at least start there before all the inevitable compromises are tackled!

From Sector 5 Digital, I'd nominate my collegues Shawn, Alyssa and Nel!

That's all from me!