ecobee is a smart home company that makes intuitive and beautiful smart thermostats. This year the company challenged itself to elevate its creative expression and introduce its latest innovation – the new ecobee SmartThermostat with voice control. We were approached to help ecobee enhance their visual communication and create a film to convey ecobeeʼs mission to make it easy and affordable for homeowners to reduce their environmental footprint while enhancing the way they experience comfort.

We explored visual representations of the ecobee SmartThermostat’s effect on both the home and the environment, while showcasing its sleek engineering. The product is displayed like a jewel, a dark reflective stone with beautiful highlights that romance its crisp edges.

A key creative challenge was in visualizing invisible forces and representing them in an abstract and artistic way, while conceptually tying them back to the narrative. With everything being so subjective, it was paramount that we created the right mood and feel.

Because we had some sort of simulation in nearly every shot, it was a fun technical challenge to animate these magical dynamic objects in a realistic way, even though the viewer is consuming them through a stylized lens. Simulating cloth, rigid bodies, recursive growth, branching, and foliage, we produced many complex setups and custom tools. This was probably one of our favourite projects, as we were able to harmonize our love of tech and nature.