Imagine that you’re the owner of a small but fast-growing tech company based in San Francisco. You’re renting out a floor of an office building downtown, and while it’s currently enough space for you and your staff, you know that you’ll eventually outgrow it. So you start speaking with real estate agents and investors, and are given the chance to see a property that’s currently undergoing extensive renovations. Making the commitment to relocate your company is a big decision, and you’re not sure if it’s going to be the right environment for your employees.

That’s where we come in.

We were given the opportunity to work with 360 Third Street, a massive office building in San Francisco that was going through a renovation and rebranding. Formerly known as 370 Third Street, our client, Kilroy Realty, was redoing the entire space, and looking for potential tenants. They wanted us to create 3D images and models that would showcase their vision for the space in a way that future tenants could see the finished product, without actually waiting for it to be completed.

After a few strategy sessions with our client, we thought that the best way to approach our work would be to create a series of models, and a video, that would show a typical “day in the life” of an employee who worked in the building.

 “We really wanted to show the whole experience,” says ZUM co-founder Michael Semmen. “Potential office renters could see an entire day in front of them, and they can see what the experience would really be like for their employees.”

Our video shows an employee getting off the nearest Caltrain station and riding his bike about a mile to 360 Third. He then parks his bike into a state-of-the-art bike lock room, which was a key feature that our client wanted to highlight.

“The thing about San Francisco that we really understand is that nobody drives,” Semmen says. “So your typical employee is not going to drive. That was something that we wanted to pay attention to, because we knew that potential tenants would be looking for that.”

The employee in our video then walks into the building’s lobby, and goes about his day. We see him working in his office, having lunch in the building’s café, and eventually joining his colleagues for an after-work rooftop party.

“When someone comes in to see the property, they’re thinking in their mind ‘What is the experience going to be for my employees?  What kind of local amenities are going to be there, what are the things that are going to keep my employees at work longer?’ And that’s what we tried to show them throughout the video,” Semmen says.

In order to create the piece, the team at ZUM spent a lot of time traveling to the project site, meeting with the client team, and having many discussions centered around the story we wanted to tell. We took aerial photography of the site, mapped out the entire story board, and came up with models that showed a fairly true-to-life experience for future tenants.

Since we created the video and models for 360 Third Street, the building has found a variety of tenants to fill its office space. Most recently, as reported by J.K.Dineen, SquareTrade, a mobile device protection plan provider, signed a 54,000-square foot lease at 360 Third Street.

“It was a very cool project to work on,” says Semmen.  “It’s definitely made us think differently about future projects, and how we can utilize the same ideas moving forward.”