Digital Spark created the launch film for the Centrios smart lock, a 3D animated :60 introducing an access system built for small business. The film assembles the product out of raw material, puts it through weather and impact, then moves inside the app where one person manages every door from a phone.
The brief
Centrios needed to launch a smart lock into a category where every obvious reference point was a consumer smart home product. The communication points were clear enough on their own, easy to install, durable, simple to use, control everything from your phone, scalable. The harder constraint was tone. This is a product sold to someone whose business sits behind the door, so it had to feel strong rather than friendly, and it could not read as a copy of the consumer films already in the market. It also had to carry two products at once: the cylindrical lock everyone recognises, and the smart reader that goes on the doors a cylindrical lock cannot.
The approach
We built the film as an assembly. It opens dark on "secure your business" and the lock forms on screen, with a cutaway of molten metal running into the backplate and the housing closing around it, so the first thing you feel is that the product is made of something. The music builds to an audible click as the lock meets the door. Then durability: the camera orbits while rain, snow, heat and impact land back to back. Then it pushes in and switches to a wide angle lens, because a lens change reads in CG the same way it does in camera, and the background dissolves into moving data. That is where the film turns from a piece of hardware into a system. One phone, many doors, access granted and revoked, and the smart reader appearing on storefront and server room doors to show the platform scales past a single lock. It pulls out to a product shot and signs off on the line the whole piece was built to earn, that Centrios can be there when you cannot.
The result
A 55-second launch film that introduces a lock, a reader and a platform in one piece, built to run at launch and keep working afterwards as product page and sales content. Part of the same Centrios body of work as the Software Explainer and the Subscription Plan explainer: one job per film, each one turning a piece of the access platform into something a small business owner understands straight away.
Common questions
Who created the Centrios smart lock video?
Digital Spark, a creative production house in Charlotte, NC, created the :60 3D animated launch film for the Centrios smart lock, part of a wider body of animation work for the brand.
Why was the Centrios smart lock launch animated rather than filmed?
The film had to show the product being built from raw material, survive weather and impact, and then become a system of many doors managed from a single phone. Animation goes inside a product and across locations in a way a camera cannot, which is the usual reason a technical product is animated rather than shot.
What is the Centrios smart reader?
The companion product to the cylindrical lock. It goes on the doors a cylindrical lock cannot: storefront glass doors with aluminium mullions, server room doors, and anything secured by a deadbolt or an electric latch. It is the reason the launch film had to show more than one door.