Pangolin

Making Graphs A Bit Nicer

When the lovely people at Pangolin Pharmatech approached us to create an engaging video, we were excited. You might ask, why on earth would we get excited at the prospect of creating an informative animation for a pharmaceutical analytics company? That would be not only a mouthful, but also a perfectly understandable train of thought. Well, one reason for the aforementioned excitement was the brief. We were challenged to deliver an illustrated character to give a more endearing quality to what is otherwise a very data heavy topic. This sort of thing really tickles us - giving us a license to make the boring, not so boring - and even fun from time to time. Another reason was the company's general approach of what they wanted to achieve visually, including to use their brand's refined colour scheme for the animation, with a vision to project a clean, modern vibe. All in all, a refreshing project, with a mindset that seemed in line with our own. Hurray!

We started as usual by planning the visual style. Restricting wild deviations from the Pangolin brand colour palette allowed for a more focused design method, better utilising basic form and placement in the illustrative style. See:

During these initial designs we played around with the idea of using mechanical items and machinery to represent the less than engaging spreadsheet process, but this was scrapped in case it could influence the perception of the company. No one wanted the possibility of the message communicated being seen as anything other than that of a pharmatech brand. We stuck to relatable iconography that was visually stimulating, but remained true to the content...

... and we created lots of icons.

We took spreadsheets, and we made an animation about them which made them look awesome. We're thrilled with the final product, it's clean, striking, and most importantly it successfully manages to clearly communicate quite a complex message. 

Check out the moving parts below at the Pangolin website, here!

Sixt - Drink Driving Campaign

Creating a Memorable Video to Prevent Drink Driving

Shortly before Christmas, we were asked by the creative marketing agency, Every1 to work with them on creating an animated drink driving campaign for the multinational car rental company, Sixt. 

Months later, and after numerous tweaks, the project has finally reached completion. 

The writers at Every1 had conceptualised a story that used word play on popular cocktail names, which we thought was a very clever way to appeal to a cocktail culture that might be tempted to drink and drive. Building upon this concept, we proposed a visually stylistic presentation of the story, through silhouetted images contained within the various cocktail glasses. Getting the green light on this idea, we set to work designing a striking visual approach to complement the impacting narrative content.

We employed clean cut lines to reflect the general tone of cocktail menu design, and a vibrant colour palette to match the luscious gradients and hues of popular drinks.

In animation, after considerable experimentation to create subtle bubble effects, we found that a combination of motion tweened layers of digital brush speckles with a couple of simple particle effects worked best. For one or two relevant drinks that have more of a pronounced fizz, we additionaly filmed a glass filling up with cola and overlayed it within the particle layers.

To create the grunge look of later shots, we photographed various weathered surfaces, painted decor, and scuffed glass. We multiplied these images with digitised brushstrokes on top of our silhouetted designs, allowing for a level of gritty realism which contrasted nicely with the clean cocktail design style.

Does none of this make sense? Well, just take a look at the final video below, it might become clearer. Let us know what you think, we're pretty chuffed with it. A word of caution, it's much darker than our usual fare! 

To find out more, and get all of the facts, visit www.sixt.co.uk/drink-drive-awareness