About the Project
LendLease, one of Australia’s top construction companies, approached Visual Domain to produce a short video to celebrate their achievements as recognised by GRESB – a global, independant organisation that evaluates real-estate and infrastructure companies for their environmental and sustainability performance.
Create a 30-second animated video with the supplied information. Use the fonts, colours and graphical elements contained within the style-guide. Highlight the global nature of LendLease’s achievements. Make it fun and exciting.
We acknowledged quickly that we would need catchy and complex graphic elements throughout. The animation strategy to was to include many moving elements, not to let things stay still for more than a second or two (and then only in anticipation of the movement to follow), use really hard eases with extreme peaks of velocity, use a variety of transitions and use secondary animations away from the main focus. Graphically we borrowed widely from their extensive colour palette (using their bolder colours except for the Earth graphic), we used an appealing contrast of bold blocks of colour and thin line elements (using their circle, semi-circle and quarter-circle graphic elements to complement the Earth graphic) and almost always using their bolder fonts (using colour for emphasis instead). (See fonts, colours and graphical elements from the Project Images right.)
When dealing with simple text and numerous graphical elements, fine-tuning the look can require many seemingly minor iterations (see Style Frames in Project Images right.)
The design of the Earth needed to a little different – fitting somewhere between the faint background elements and the bold and bright foreground. It also needed to be visually interesting in a number of ways. This was achieved with: line dark lines on flat colours, the only uses of their softer colours in the style-guide, off-set and overlaying colours, an unnatrual but appealing “2D” rotation, extra rotating lines around the earth, and gently wiggling floating graphical elements nearby. We felt that all of these elements were needed to keep it aesthetically satisfying without competing with the bold text in the foreground.
The pace starts on the slow side, but with some quick text animation, and builds quickly when the numbers appear. From here it maintains a fast pace until slowing a bit to show their award highlights and finally the logo. This was the plan after we broke the video into five distinct sections: 1. Numbers, 2. GRESB Awards, 3. Globe Intro, 4. Achievement Highlights, 5. Outro. The issue was always going to be making the final pace fit the plan perfectly. Because of this, the project was animated over almost double the time initially so that the feel could be fine-tuned backwards (see Pre-Timing Animations bottom-right).
Lastly, not that motion-blur is used everywhere except the scene with the Earth. It was something to do with the complexity getting lost, but it seemed to have the opposite effect it did in the rest of the video – it reduced the feeling of pace. I can’t explain the science here.
The client was enthusiastic and communicated that expectations were well-exceeded. They increased the budget, requesting two more versions in vertical and square format to use across their socials.
Resigning the videos for social media was a fun challenge. It’s very easy to lose a lot of the initial expression when you change a video’s ratio – but we were able to make some exciting choices to make use of the space including pushing the number count vertically and having the Earth shift up-and-down instead of side-to-side. The results were really engaging and we believed made full use of the space where other videos often fail. The client was just as excited as we were.
After the animations are set comes the (often tricky) task of fine-tuning the timing. In this case we needed a very punchy video and required reducing the time to almost half! (From 55 seconds to 30 seconds.)