Did You Know?
Social Media Ad
Client: Gift of Life
Goal: Create a short social media ad that shows people aged 20-25 how easy it is to join a blood/bone marrow registry and potentially save a life.
Pre-Production
The main question I asked myself was: how do we not only reach this age group, but how do we make them care?
The ad would immediately ask the question "did you know?" to the audience in order to engage with them, and force them to stop scrolling.
From there, slick animation and type accompanied by driving music would hold attention to the end where we give the call to action.
The theory was this age group likes the idea of helping people, but they may not know how easy it is to help a patient with leukemia or a different blood disorder. After learning this, they would be motivated to sign up.
I found some pieces of animation to show the client as reference, they showed me some materials from competitors they liked, and I was off to the races.
Poke around my moodboard below! (ctrl + mouse wheel to zoom)
Sketching and Storyboards
Due to time constraints, the sketching and storyboarding phase was very compressed. I did some initial sketches, got some feedback from some friends, and moved on to making the storyboards.
Again, because of limited time, I decided to forgo sketched storyboards or even style frames and skip straight to storyboards with final artwork.
Animation
It turns out creating fully finalized storyboards for the client really helped in the animation process. Because I had all my compositions perfect in Illustrator, I didn't have to spend that time in After Effects carefully placing everything. This was a godsend, and afforded me extra time to tweak my keyframes, match cuts and transitions.
Sadly, I forgot to do any screen recording of my work, so we'll have to live with some timeline screenshots.
Lessons Learned
This project was a unique challenge for me. It was the first client project where I wore the hats of creative director, designer and animator. I was forced to rapidly grow my communication skills as all of a sudden I'm the one pitching, fielding feedback, updating my producer and doing the actual design and animation.
Here's the biggest lesson I learned on this project:
Work with the client to figure out their goals immediately.
Not only did the client need help nailing down the messaging and concept for the ad, but they really needed help identifying the main goal of the ad. I made the mistake of assuming what the goal was, and as a result wasted some crucial time in the beginning on pitched ideas that just weren't what they needed. I'll remedy this on future projects by hopping on a Zoom call with the client to nail down the goal of the project, and afterwards send an email summarizing the call so both the client and I have something in writing to refer back to throughout the project.