Explainer video
The purpose of this project was to create an explainer video that could go on Contentful’s homepage and could easily explain a very technically complex headless CMS product to someone who had never heard of it.
Directed design and copywriting teams from start to finish: brainstorming and scripting, storyboarding, animatic, voiceover, sound design, and final animation
Compared to a previous explainer video we had done with an agency, we completed this video in-house in half the time, less than half the budget, and with dramatically higher quality
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Creative director, team lead
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Heidi Tretheway – content lead
Andrew Conlon – illustration
Ariel Chu – animation
Joe Basile – sound design
Virginia Welch – voiceover
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Content creators, Marketers, budget approvers who were unfamiliar with the concept of a headless content platform
1. PROJECT PLANNING
Before kicking off the project, I presented a project plan that outlined the scope and objective, ownership and responsibilities, and a detailed timeline with owners for each milestone.
I also made sure to collect input from key users (i.e.: teams that were going to be heavy users of the explainer video, like Sales and Field Marketing) on what they thought was working/not working with our previous explainer video, to help guide our brainstorm.
2. BRAINSTORMING THE SCRIPT
The script was a collaborative effort between design, content, and animation. We wanted to ensure that we were not shoehorning illustration and animation around copy – instead, we wanted everything to work together, to tell a holistic, integrated story.
2. STORYBOARD (LO-FI)
After creating the script, we put together a collective mood board of illustration and animation styles and motifs that we were inspired by, then began creating our lo-fi storyboard, laying the illustrations out with the script and revising as needed to get to a flow that we were all happy with.
3. STAKEHOLDER APPROVAL
A key concern I had was making sure that we were not going to be surprised by changes once we started the time-intensive animation process (this was a big setback during our first explainer video). So while we began working on the hi-fi storyboard, I also made sure to reach back out to our key users for final input, as well as final sign-off from our CMO. We were extremely clear that this was their last opportunity to give feedback, as changes would be very difficult once we started animation. Because we had included their input early on in the process, this part went very smoothly and we did not have any surprise changes later on.
4. STORYBOARD (HI-FI)
The hi-fi storyboard included full color illustrations, timed to the script, with animation notes. Once approved, my illustrator began packing the artwork for animation.
5. VOICEOVER & ANIMATIC
While our animator worked on the rough animatic, I worked on sourcing a voiceover artist from Voice123.com. Because the brief was very clear (I provided both the script and a sample recording to demonstrate pacing, inflection, and pronunciation), we were able to source an artist very quickly and turn the voiceover recording over to animation, which helped her pace the animatic.
6. SOUND DESIGN & ROUGH ANIMATION
With the animatic in hand, I was able to work with a sound designer to create the unique background music and sound effects that we wanted for the video. We began by aligning on the type of sound that we wanted: I was inspired by an instrumental cut of “Fireflies” by Owl City, which had the kind of upbeat, tech-y sound that we wanted, without veering into “campy space sounds” territory.
Once the rough animation was done, I worked with our sound designer to layer sound effects to the music. And after some final revisions to the rough animation, we were ready for the finished product.
7. FINAL ANIMATION & IMPACT
I am very proud of our final product – it makes content management and the benefit that Contentful provides easy for even non-developers to understand. Compared to a previous explainer video we had done with an agency, we completed this video in-house in half the time, less than half the budget, and with dramatically higher quality. The explainer video lived on our homepage for a year, and is still being used by Contentful’s Marketing and Sales teams to easily explain the product to prospective customers.