GoFindYou

I creative directed an ad campaign for GoFundMe centered around black joy. It was really great to be a part of the process from start to finish, from pitch, to pre-production, to shoots with talent to post production and rollout.

First I created a Google slide deck to pitch my creative vision to the client. I was given a color palette and a brief to focus on dreams and positivity. There would be a total of 8 videos following real life GoFundMe heroes who have made amazing campaigns that helped fulfill their dreams.

The tagline was GoFindYou, a play on GoFundMe. The subjects of the videos did things as varied as starting farmers markets in food deserts to creating creating a cross country dog grooming business.

My pitch deck included a rough storyboard on one side, and a Voice over on the other, along with a description of the video and a motion reference.

Official colors and squiggles that represent the exuberance of the 8 videos.

While thinking of my concept, I had to keep in mind that these are real people and not actors, so I needed to allow enough flexibility to make a beautiful video with a remote shoot with people who aren’t necessarily comfortable in front of a camera. The shoot would also take place in both homes and studios across the US, so I needed to get a consistent look across all locations.

I settled on a stop motion style where the talent could be shot with a drop kit and 1 professional video person to guide them. In this style, they wouldn’t have to be on camera for a sustained period, I could choose the best expressions and movements, and the green screen, shotlist, and lighting guide would ensure that there was a consistent look across all 8 shoots.

From there it was a week of script writing. I looked at all of the original GoFundMe campaigns and read the transcripts of previously done interviews to create a script. I wrote in a way that was colloquial as possible because I wanted the scripts to have the same cadence as the talent’s natural speech. Almost none of them had delivered voice over before so I wanted the process to be as smooth as possible. Once the first 4 scripts were delivered and approved, I created this somewhat unhinged shotlist, along with a written guide of what the talent should wear and expect from the shoot. I juggled overseeing the shoots and worked on animating the videos simultaneously.

There were 5 animators (including myself) involved during the 2 month project that came in and out depending on their availability. The pace was pretty intense, so I made sure that there was a starter file and elements to choose from, and did quality control in frame.io to make sure that the work matched the original storyboards and that the client was happy. After the final videos went tot the client for approval, I helped create final banner ads and assets for web.

Opioids Documentary

In fall 2019, Quartz released a Gracie Award-winning opioids documentary: a sprawling, international look at how Purdue pharmaceuticals have marketed opioids in the U.S., and how they’re currently using the same tactics to market them abroad under Mundipharma. My team traveled to France, the Netherlands, and Pakistan to report this story, talking to black market pharmaceutical dealers, doctors, and drug reps.

I was in charge of post production while juggling art direction of two other video series. In this documentary, I was responsible for art direction, animation and finishing edits.

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Organization and Tone

The goal of this investigation was to create something that was about opioids but…funny. We didn’t want to make another crushingly depressing documentary and were going for tongue and cheek. It was a difficult balance that we achieved with high contrast footage that emphasized shadows, contrasted with bright, almost cutesy graphics. We added a voice actor that served as the main character of the documentary and had him narrate as if he was an opioid marketer. We told him to come in with a “used car salesman” suit, and we shot stills of him in the studio. From there, I chose selects and then used Photoshop to turn his brown suit lavender, putting him on a bright blue background to give a late-night-infomercial feel.

After Charles’ styling was decided, I moved onto organization. I created a 1000+ cell spreadsheet that included thumbnails of the graphics, checks for completion and fact checking, and notes on changes. It became our post production bible that we used to create daily schedules and estimate final delivery. Because of the check marks and color coding it was immediately apparent what needed to get done at a glance, and keep track of any changes.

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Animation

My proudest creation from this project is my pill monster. It represents the workings of the pharmaceutical industry and how drug reps, insurance companies, doctors and the black market work in tandem to create this demand for new drugs. My interpretation of the “pharmaceutical machine” was personifying steampunk gears, money, pills and syringes into a scuttling monster that travels across the globe. I wanted it to be a slightly more sinister Howl’s moving castle, but also have an inherent element of absurdity.

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Documents

Half of this story is told through legal proceedings, so I had to figure out a way to make documents interesting. Most of these documents were not high resolution, so I ended up using a mixture of roughen edges and an alpha texture on top of a masked paper background to bring text up word-by-word and give the animation dynamism.

I always used a crumpled paper texture to give documents a bit more visual interest and did a lot of layering so it wasn’t just the title page of the document, but some of the contents.