The international design and consulting firm IDEO reached out to us from their San Francisco office with a challenging project: help them create a marketing video for the launch of Shape, their new collaboration product.
IDEO is working to solve huge global challenges, so they wanted the Shape video to reflect their current initiatives–the future of automobility. To highlight how Shape works, we used the story of Ari and how she used a proven framework to solicit ideas, gather feedback and foster close collaboration among a group of enterprise peers. In the end, Ari’s team comes up with some cool—and some wacky—ideas that could one day solve all of our mobility and traffic issues. Ari is able to quickly solicit feedback on the ideas, iterate and eventually develop a final prototype.
BIEN was responsible for creative direction and animation, working hand in hand with the IDEO team and their illustration partner Cassandra Fontaine to create a unique video featuring an original music score by the talented Kevin Boenzli. The guiding strategy was to create something you’ve never seen or heard before. We didn’t want to create just another explainer style video.
As a production partner, we were involved early on, shaping the overall direction and style of the video and offering visual solutions on the fly throughout the process to address client feedback. For animation, we used a variety of techniques – cel animation for the characters and 2D motion graphics for everything else. This allowed us to add some quirk and nuance to the star of the show, Ari, while keeping the budget within reasonable limits.
This project required us to animate low riders, mech suits, drones and flying cars. So yeah, we had a great time doing it!