Making Milwaukee's Drill Bits Look Like the Hero, Not the Accessory

Most of the Milwaukee briefs that land on our desk are for the tools people actually notice: a new saw, a radio, a robot built out of Packout boxes. The Red Hex drill bit animation was a different kind of brief. A drill bit is small, it is largely the same shape as every other drill bit on the market, and nobody has ever put one on a poster. Our job was to make it worth watching anyway.

We built the animation around the two things that actually separate a Red Hex bit from a cheaper one: the hex shank that stops it slipping in the chuck, and the coating that keeps it cutting after the two hundredth hole. Rather than showing the bit spinning in isolation, we lit it like a product a customer would want to hold, brass gold coating catching a hard key light, the machined hex faces picking out sharp reflections as the camera pushes past them.

The hardest part of small product work like this is scale. At true size, a drill bit reads as a sliver of metal on screen. Blow it up too far and the surface starts looking like plastic. We modelled the flutes and coating wear at a level of detail that only shows up once you are close, then built the camera move to earn that closeness gradually, starting wide enough to place the product before pushing in on the shank and cutting edge.

Milwaukee's own product photography is excellent at showing a tool in a trade setting. What a short 3D animation gives them instead is a piece of content built for a feed: something that holds attention for a few seconds without needing a voiceover or a location shoot, and that can be reused across social and web without ever needing to be reshot for a different market.

It is also a decent test of whether a studio can do the unglamorous work well. Anyone can make a flagship product look good. Making a drill bit look considered, without exaggerating what it does, is a smaller and in some ways harder brief, and it is the kind of work that tends to repeat. Once a client sees their supporting range treated with the same care as the hero product, more of it turns up in the pipeline.