ACE Apprenticeships
Explainer video about apprenticeships for college credit
I love a longer-form animated video! It’s a nice break from all the short-form social videos I crank out that are :10, :15, and :30 seconds. On these, I can really take my time to work on the details and finesse the final product.
My friend and former colleague at Reingold, Bryan Eckerson, recommended me to The American Council on Education for this project. (I get a lot of my work via word-of-mouth!) Their in-house animator had recently left, so they needed a freelancer. Ally Hammond, Senior Graphic Designer at ACE, created the storyboards and designed all the cute characters and scenes. At this stage, I was brought on to help steer the visuals and provide feedback on both the script and storyboard, which was helpful in making the video more visually-focused. Sometimes when an animator is not brought on early, the script can sound way too vague and difficult to later translate to the screen. So I’m grateful I got a say in how things are worded in the voiceover, and how to visualize that on the screen!
Once the storyboard was finished, Ally sent me her vector files. I needed the characters to move their arms, heads, blink, so that required a lot of good organization so their limbs were on different layers. Everything that needs to move has to be on it’s own layer. It’s all about layers!
I found a voiceover artist, the music, and got animating. I love the carousel style of animation at 0:09 and 1:00. I enjoyed having the clouds, birds, and planes in the sky as extra details. At 0:47, I noticed a big lull in the visuals, with nothing to place on screen. So I decided to put the text on the screen, since it’s a significant part statement worth highlighting. It’s my job as animator to call out things like this, where the visuals need something more, and find a solution that fits with the existing look and feel.
ACE was very happy with this project, and so was I! They later approached me with a big project for animated modules for training, which I also did. (It’s not featured on my website because those are private internal communications for their team). The final video lives on the ACE Apprenticeships website.