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WORD CLOUD

A Case Study in animating words.

SmartWrap® wanted to have their new ‘Design • Print • Ship’ campaign premier at the SEMA trade show in Las Vegas. 

 

Along with a printed catalog of the various packages available and video, they asked for an introduction animation that could loop with the other video elements. It needed to be catchy and short, but still say what they were offering.

USE YOUR WORDS

But make it clean.

PROJECT DETAILS

I was already editing the sales video and since a video of straight sales pitches can be a little dry, I was asked to make it more fun to watch. I thought that animated intro and outro sections might be able to do that and it let me play with some motion graphics as well. 

 

The intro and outro sections of the looping video needed to be catchy but short. They needed to grab your attention so you would want to stand there for another minute at their trade show booth and watch the sales video.

 

PROCESS

LOREM, IPSUM OR SOMETHING ELSE?

I started the project creating some retro styled text in Illustrator and then animating it in After Effects. I had them bouncing into frame, trying to make it fun and somewhat interesting to watch.

 

But I realized that the look and feel was all wrong for the client. It was becoming a showcase for artistic freedom. I scrapped the idea and started over.

WHAT ARE WORDS FOR

When no one listens anymore...

EAT YOUR WORDS

mmmmmm...tasty.

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF WORDS

So while I am cruising around Pinterest for some inspiration I come across an image of a bunch of words jumbled together in different sizes and angles. I get this idea to animate words in a way that reveals the most important words of the campaign.

 

I click on the image and it takes me to an online word cloud generator.  

 

While the site was awesome an provided a ton of inspiration, I was going to have to build this in Illustrator because the output was low resolution and I needed to have maximum flexibility in After Effects.

IN OTHER WORDS

I managed to build the word cloud in Illustrator using about 10 words specific to the industry that SmartWrap was targeting. I simply repeated them in different sizes and colors to create density.

 

In after Effects, I duplicated the layer several times and placed them all in a 3D space. By accident, I chose a lens for the camera that had a shallow depth of field so it blurred some of the layers in a way that would have taken me some time to achieve.

 

That lucky lens choice with some motion blur created the flying motion I was looking for. 

ON CLOUD 9

The cloud parts...

SOME FINAL WORDS

Flying through the clouds...

ACTING UPON YOUR WORD

The only thing left to do was to animate the camera in a virtual 3D space and have the camera fly in and around the word cloud to the 3 words that define the campaign: Design, Print and Ship.

RESULTS

The final word cloud can be seen below.

 

This became part of their major campaign to boost sales in the vehicle wrap industry. It was targeted towards smaller install shops that had clientele but minimal resources for designing and printing the large format graphics required for vehicle wraps. This short intro/outro helped make the main video more engaging which resulted in numerous leads from the trade show and ultimately increasing sales.