Executive Summary
Toy Robot Media had two and a half weeks to produce six weeks of 360-degree immersive content for a Zyn brand activation in Miami. The studio replaced its rendered previs pipeline with Foveate 3D Previs, a timeline-based 3D environment with collaborative review built in. The activation shipped on time, on brand, and on budget.
60% timeline compression. Zero rendering required for client review.
The Zyn brand activation, Miami, May 2026. Projection-mapped walls and floor with synchronized content. Content production by Toy Robot Media.
The Challenge
Toy Robot Media produces content for large-scale brand activations and live productions. The Miami activation for Zyn (a Philip Morris International brand, with agency partner Known and production partner FGPG) gave the team a fraction of the normal runway.
The constraint was severe:
- 2.5 weeks to deliver what typically takes 6 weeks minimum
- 360-degree projection-mapped content across walls and floor
- Fortune 100 brand standards with no margin for missed details
- Multiple stakeholders reviewing at different fidelity expectations
A 360-degree immersive room. Every audience position is a different vantage point. A flat rendered preview captures one of them.
Traditional previs pipelines were the bottleneck. Every client review required rendering the scene from selected camera angles, exporting flat video, uploading to Frame.io, gathering comments, and translating them back to the production team.
For a 360-degree immersive room, that workflow is structurally broken. A flat preview cannot represent what an audience experiences from inside the space.
Rob Jalil, partner at Toy Robot Media, named the hidden cost directly:
Previs is never a zero-dollar part of the project. The more of our budget we can spend on making the actual show, the better the show is.
Rob Jalil
Partner, Toy Robot Media
Standard render-and-review cycles would not fit the timeline. The team needed a different category of tool.
The Solution
Toy Robot Media is a Founding Partner in Foveate's co-development program. The team deployed Foveate 3D Previs, a timeline-based 3D previs tool that replaces rendered previews with a live 3D scene.
The implementation enabled the team to:
- Place video content directly on surfaces in the 3D scene as material textures
- Synchronize multiple content streams on a unified timeline with timed cues
- Review from any camera position, validating sightlines that flat previews cannot represent
- Attach comments to specific surfaces at specific timecodes
- Integrate with existing tools through API access to Dropbox, Airtable, and Slack
Multi-track content management in Foveate 3D Previs. Video assets mapped to surfaces and synchronized across tracks.
The integration was decisive. Toy Robot’s six-digit asset naming convention in Airtable auto-routed Dropbox uploads to the correct 3D surface. Comments flowed back to Airtable as the single source of truth. No retraining. No process migration.
Any software service, I’m almost not interested if there’s no API access. I’m not willing to pay for a software service that doesn’t give me the ability to patch into the systems we’ve built already.
Rob Jalil
Partner, Toy Robot Media
The Founding Partner relationship shipped features on production timelines. When Toy Robot identified the need for a multi-track timeline feature mid-production on a separate project, the feature shipped before the next client review.
The Results
The Miami activation shipped on schedule, on brand, and within scope. The team measured four concrete outcomes:
60% reduction in production timeline. Delivered 360-degree content in 2.5 weeks against a 6-week industry standard.
90% reduction in previs phase time. Rob Jalil estimated 1 hour per review cycle, compared to 10 hours in the team's previous workflow.
One full-time production role compressed. Eliminated the dedicated screens producer role typically required for projects of this scope.
Zero workflow disruption. Integration with Dropbox, Airtable, and Slack meant no team retraining or process migration.
The human impact mattered as much as the metrics. Production staff who would have spent the project translating client comments and re-rendering preview files spent it on content the audience would actually walk through.
The audience in Miami walked into a space that matched the previs.
The Zyn activation in Miami. The audience walked into a space that matched the previs.
Bring Foveate to Your Next Production
Foveate is a pursuit intelligence platform for design and production firms. The Founding Partner program is open for studios with workflow problems suited to co-development.
If your team is shipping content-bearing 3D work on compressed timelines, the conversation is worth having.
About the Author
Kitae Kim
Architect with 10 years of experience in design and client communication. Co-founder of Foveate, where he builds proposal and presentation tools for AEC and production firms. Former studio lead who saw too many winning designs lose to worse proposals.
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