Shape, Color, Motion: How INX Films Animated Change for Thinslices' New Brand Reveal
Mission
When you’re at the end of a well-done rebranding process, you can’t wait to tell the world about your company’s new identity! But how do you actually communicate that? Well, Thinslices, at the advice of Visual Hackers, opted to do a brand reveal video, and that’s where we at INX Films came in to help.
Outcome
We’ve created a short brand reveal video that bursts with energy, and we did that by animating and showcasing Thinslices’ new visual identity elements, their website and their new offices.
Impact
The brand reveal became one of Thinslices' most successful social media videos: it gained 30x more reacts and 8x more reposts than their average video on LinkedIn, as well as 4x more views and 2x more reacts compared to their average on Facebook.
Our well-thought out and transparent approach ensured that Thinslices’ first complex video project felt like a breeze. The folks over at Thinslices said working with INX Films was refreshingly straightforward.
Details
Services Rendered
- Project Concepting & Development
- Storyboarding
- Animation & Motion-graphics Production
- Video Editing
- Sound Design
Collaborators
- done through Visual Hackers
Over their 10+ years of activity, Thinslices have grown into a premiere full-service product development company, with offices in Iasi, Lisbon, London and Berlin.
Growing is a good thing, but it also meant that the time had come for Thinslices to rebrand itself. That in and of itself is challenging enough, but what most people don’t think of is the challenge that comes after that - communicating that new identity to clients, colleagues, and the rest of the whole wide world.
To do this, Thinslices partnered up with the Visual Hackers design agency, who proposed doing an animated brand reveal video. And for the actual nitty-gritty animation-witty work they contacted us at INX Films.
The Process
When work starts on a project such as this, the first step is to establish the creative direction that we want to pursue, so we wasted no time. After initial discussions with Visual Hackers and Thinslices it became clear that the focus should be on Thinslices’ new visual language and website, so we decided on the concept of a text-centric video, without the usual voice-over to tell the story. Instead, a stand-out song, energy-filled text and lively shape animations would do the heavy lifting of keeping the viewers glued to their screens.
Next up, we got straight into to the three main steps of the creation process - scriptwriting, storyboarding, and animating.
Scriptwriting was the trickiest part of the process for this project - we needed to make a script that was less about what words we used and more about how those words moved. Literally. In these situations, we use a table format for the script - the first column would show what text would appear on-screen, while the second column would describe how it was going to be animated - and it paid off: we actually got approval to move to the next stage a few days ahead of schedule.
After integrating feedback into the script, we went on to the storyboarding phase. The folks over at Thinslices had shared some of the most captivating references, so these became our biggest help here. For this particular project, this was also the stage where we created and refined the static art elements that we would be bringing to life during the animation phase.
And this final phase was pure focused bliss. Thinslices needed a video that would turn heads, so we went all in. We took each and every one of Thinslices' new visual elements and made them move, we shifted colors, we bounced shapes, morphed symbols, moved cameras, animated text. We even did some VFX to create time-lapses out of still photos for some of the cities housing Thinslices' offices.
The Outcome
The result was a motion-graphics video that mixed together creative editing, kinetic typography, morphing shapes, photo manipulation and sound design in a way that pumped energy into Thinslices’ brand reveal and kept viewers watching ‘til the end. And by correctly anticipating client preferences and handling feedback efficiently, we actually wrapped the entire project a few days ahead of time!
The Impact
Once it was released on social media, it became one of Thinslices' most successful videos at the time: it gained 30x more reacts and 8x more reposts than their average video on LinkedIn, as well as 4x more views and 2x more reacts compared to their average on Facebook.
But the result we were most happy about was the feedback we got from people at Thinslices, who felt working with INX Films was refreshingly straightforward. Even though they were worried about doing such a complex video when they first decided on it, we made them feel confident it could be done from the very first meeting. Our streamlined process and transparent approach ensured that a complex project such as this video felt like a breeze throughout the whole production process.
Is your business looking to tell something awesome to the world? Let’s chat to see if you can do it through video!