The animation we do comes in many, many forms, from social-ready animated gifs to hand-drawn, bespoke worlds and characters. Animation can be layered on top of video (motion graphics) or be a full screen, detailed extravaganza.
Here’s a look at what we do…
Case Study
Avon On
Launch Animation
Avon is one of our longest-standing clients, and we’ve worked closely with them across animation, film, and photography. In early 2021, Avon was gearing up to launch a new internal app to help their sales representatives place and track orders, share product info and offers, and create their own social media-ready images. The app was called Avon On, and Avon’s digital team needed a launch video to drum up excitement and highlight the app’s major features.
The first step in most animation projects is a fact finding mission, and it was no different here. We met with Avon to find out all about the app, its features, colour palette, user interface, roadmap, and more. As we’re practiced hands with the Avon brand, we came into this fact finding mission with a thorough understanding of Avon’s brand, preferred tone of voice, and preferred style of imagery.
With all of this information in mind, we began script and storyboard development, creating a narrative that touched on all of Avon On’s major features without drilling too far into the details.
Alongside this, we came up with a solid animation concept that blended 2D backgrounds with occasional 3D elements. We bookended the video with the flashier 3D animations, using them to guarantee an engaging introduction and a memorable finish.
Key to the animation concept was the creation of a guide character to take the viewer through all the app’s details. The Avon On logo proved perfect for this, with features that could be subtly manipulated to create emoji-like expressions, and a shape we could change depending on the context.
Above is a portion of the draft storyboard presented to Avon’s digital team. Alongside this we presented a movement test, demonstrating how we’d like to anthropomorphise the Avon On logo. From here we had a tense wait while Avon’s branding team decided whether to approve our use of the Avon On logo and, thankfully, got a thumbs up.
We find that the clearer a picture we can get of the storyboard and script, the smoother production runs, so we took the script and storyboard through several rounds of amendments with Avon’s digital team. Then, with approvals from all involved, we got animating.
The work we put in at the concept, scripting, and storyboarding phases paid dividends, and the production phase ran smooth like butter. A few refinements later, we had the video you see above, and a very happy Avon digital team. We couldn’t be there at the official launch event, but we understand it was a roaring success, and look forward to our next work with Avon’s digital team.