How does YouTube advertise YouTube as a platform for advertisers? Well, they make videos. In my role as senior motion designer at the Loomis Group, I led animation for seven short stories promoting its marketing tools for businesses: from mobile ads to smart analytics like TrueView. I developed concept sketches in pre-production, led 3D animation and rigging, and animated complex elements in After Effects.
Challenge
YouTube’s diverse set of products and services meant we needed to showcase a wide range of ideas: case studies of successful small businesses, abstract ideas about analytics, and lots of insights and statistics that showed the potential scale of advertising on YouTube. This project combined infographics, animation, typography, and video, depicting an optimistic world of possibilities for businesses.
Role
• Senior Motion Designer
• Senior Cinema 4D Artist
• Senior After Effects artist
• Senior Cinema 4D Artist
• Senior After Effects artist
Process
Our first video in the series covered TrueView, an analytics tool. The Trueview product story was focused on concepts rather than case studies, so we couldn’t cut to example videos or other content: we needed to translate a business idea to life. We decided to illustrate these ideas with 3D animation, taking the viewer from introduction to conclusion with a visual analogy of cupcakes.
Too much 3D turned out to be unsustainable for the Loomis group’s render farm, so for the next videos we narrowed the use of 3D and did more with animated type and illustrations. This allowed us to cover more conceptual ground and iterate more quickly. Also, by saving 3D effects for impactful segments at the beginning and end of each video, the 3D elements packed more punch.
Results
Our campaign was so successful, YouTube came back to produce more content with the Loomis group, including a live-action customer story. I think it was the cupcakes.