Case Study #5 - Marketing Innovators

Concepting & Creating animated explainer videos.

While working at Marketing Innovators in the Senior Designer role, I taught myself several new skills in order to bring more production in-house and save the company time and money. But of course, it's always a win-win to add new skills and knowledge to my repertoire!

One major addition was the ability to conceptualize, storyboard, and create/edit fully custom animated videos. It's quite an involved process in comparison to static design, like graphics and branding, but it's also a lot of fun!

The Process

When one learns to use video editing software, it can feel very overwhelming to get familiarized with massive number of tools and terms. But, the editing is only the tip of the iceberg when creating animated content. It's always best to start with a simple script for either voiceover or text overlays. From there, it's incredibly important to have an overview storyboard, in order to plan out your scenes and get buy-in from all decision-makers. Making changes to a video after its done is terribly inefficient, so the more upfront effort that can be made, before editing, the better off you'll be.

I learned to write effective voiceover, capture it via audio equipment, create graphics and characters, layout storyboarded scenes and timelines, import all content into Adobe After Effects, animate and add effects, control timing and transitions, export to useable formats, and store online for multiple uses. All in my free time while still performing my regular duties, saving my company time and many thousands of dollars in outsourced projects.

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good process = good product

The Results

I've been able to create dozens of video projects in the last several years, some animated, some composed of stock footage with overlays, some with footage I captured myself with a huge range of cameras and audio equipment. It's one of my favorite types of project to work on due to the range of skills needed and deeply engaging focus necessary to complete. I've also expanded into new types of animation, beyond just typical story-telling. Things like: animated logos, icons, fonts, web interactions, and more. I'm always looking to learn more and add new capabilities to my skillset.

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Click to see an example
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