Creating a Remote Work Transition Animation for Synchrony's Global Workforce During COVID
During COVID, one of the clients I work for were faced with a decision of whether or not to send their entire workforce home to work remote. After some deliberation, Synchrony decided it was in everyone's best interest and for obvious safety reasons to work from home. This posed somewhat of an issue in terms of logistics as well as technically. There were a lot of issues that needed to be addressed. One of the issues was that some people simply had never worked from home and needed help.
We were contacted by Synchrony to create an animation to send out to all of there employees to help them with the adjustment. Although there was a number of people who worked remote, the call center employees all across the globe who enjoyed working in a beautiful office with an abundance of perks were not necessarily prepared for the switch. Our team along with a team from Synchrony got together and addressed these issues and how they can and should be handled. A lot of thought went into the animation even though it was relatively short in length. We decided that being concise and sticking to easy to remember touch points and solutions was the best route.
Our first step in the creation of the animation was to write a script. Once we had a script that everyone was happy with we were able to build out a storyboard for the animation. We tried to keep the storyboard as simple as possible with simple movements and transitions. We were under a pretty tight time constraint and had to be careful about the amount of micro-animations we were taking on. Once the storyboard was approved by the client we got to work. Myself and another designer were tasked with animating and editing the project. I would take on the first half, he would take the second half.
I knew pretty early on that this was going to be a pretty heavy lift given the time constraints so I went right to work. Prior to this, Synchrony had not done much in the way of animation. We largely produce video for them so this was a challenge. They did not have much in their brand standards regarding animation so we were given leeway. We found an illustrator online who's work we thought would lend itself well to the project. We obtained as much content from them as possible and began animating.
Having worked on similar projects like this in the past, I started out as I always do by breaking down each illustration in Illustrator piece by piece so that I am able to animate anything and everything I need to in After Effects. It's a time consuming process, but the more diligent you are about it, the easier your life is going to be once you start animating.
Bringing Synchrony’s Remote Work Guide Animation to Life in After Effects
Once I had all of my assigned scenes broken up into layered .ai files I was able to import everything into AE and start animating. For me that's the fun part. I love animation and figuring out ways to achieve a certain look, feel or movement. I'm always online checking out content created by other designers and animators. I'm always trying to stay on top new techniques and trends as much as possible. This particular animation ended up coming together pretty smoothly. The amount of time we spent prepping and collaborating was essential to project running smoothly. Myself and the other designer, as well as the rest of the team, all work remote. I think because of this it really puts you in a position to be really open and honest about how you're doing with your project. It also in my opinion really promotes team work because you're not all in one room together working on a project and can see things in real time. For me, working remote has only made me a better designer and a better communicator. I like that.
Below is the final animation. It took a couple months to complete. There were hiccups and speed bumps along the way but we worked it out. The client was extremely happy with the final product which led to more animation work from them in the months and years that followed.