A short overview of a animated series produced together with production house Hoferichter & Jacobs for the media conglomerate FUNK.
Category:
Edutainment
Location:
Remote, Berlin
Tight timelines, tighter branding.
SayWhat was an animated educational series commissioned by FUNK, popular media conglomerate from Germany. Each episode worked under an extremely short time-frame, which included a total of 8 days from the moment your receive the script, to the moment the video needed to go live (one day for storyboarding, one day for a tempo cut, and five days for motion design and one day for feedback).
While this timeline resulted in an incredibly fast-paced environment, it also allowed our team (who would meet in person every once in a while) to create assets that could be recycled throughout production, as well as learning to put the most effort into things that made the biggest impact.
1, 2, 3 - ANIMATE!
The most effective way to get things done in time was as follows: you get as much as you possibly can defined on the very first day. While flexibility is good, if you need to stop and think throughout the week instead of animating, you're going to get hung up on the details. Now, because you shouldn't have more than 2 seconds without something happening on-screen, that means you need to be smart about what you storyboard: you can't have entire new rigs and compositions for every sentence.
In practice, this means that you want to imbue several sentences into each one of the compositions you design, so that you can keep on using it. On the other hand, over-animation needs to be avoided: sometimes GIFs and article cut-outs do a fantastic job at supporting the information that's being read aloud without much effort.
An amazing team.
Of course, none of this would've been possible without some amazing journalists, writers and producers. While the project has come to an end, I still remain in touch with some of the amazing talent that I got to share this period of work with.
