SYMPHONY

Projekt202 was made up of a collection of acquired companies operating in different countries, and even when in the same country they were separated by different regions and offices. We as a company lacked a unifying purpose and it was holding us back and hurting us from better serving the clients we had in common. We needed to come together somehow to celebrate our differences and unique areas of expertise in a way that empowered and encouraged collaboration going forward. This was the mandate set for us and we had to find a way to create a video that served as a rallying cry and a manifesto to get people excited about our combined abilities.

We needed to represent a fairly abstract concept without leaning on the company branding. This had to feel like a message from the bottom up instead of a mandate from the top down. The visual language had to be simple to work in different regions and languages and it had to be short and to the point. It’s hard to keep it simple in cases like this with business goals and corporate speak pushing in at every turn, but our small team of writer, art director ( me ) and animator did all that we could to keep a pure message while taking in valuable feedback.

ANIMATICS

In the course of developing the final story several other versions were roughed out, some with voice over and some without.
It took some experiments to decide how much information we needed to have on screen and how much silence.
Below is one animatic with voice over.

FINAL

This was a collaborative process to arrive at something so simple and strong.
Michael Reyes created a beautiful scrip that distilled complex business speak to something compelling and Sean Turner made those concepts move in time and space. Sean was a great motion designer to collaborate with because we could go back and forth from sketching to detailed digitally painted style frames and back into After Effects to get it just right. Many hours were spent talking about the personality and movement of a line or a blob that morphs into something else and it was one of my favorite projects that year because of this dialog.