Denise Recalde, Author at IdeaRocket

Connecting International Audiences With Animated Video

Denise Recalde — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 08:00:22 +0000

The world seems to shrink more and more every day. First, we discovered we could hop on horses—suddenly, the village two days away on foot got a lot closer. Then, Henry Ford invented that magical horseless carriage and a couple hundred miles was just a weekend getaway. Passenger planes made the Pacific seem like a pond, and today, thanks to the power of technology, it seems like the entire globe is within arm’s reach.

A more connected world means more ways to connect with international audiences. It’s quite likely then that your video marketing strategy has the power to go beyond your traditional customer base, and reach into new markets for more exposure and brand recognition.

But what if the whole wide world doesn’t exactly catch your drift?

Video translations and captioning can help make your video more accessible and easy to understand for international audiences. But compelling video doesn’t only have to be easy to understand — it also has to be understood with messaging and storytelling that is both engaging and relate-able.

When appealing to a global audience, keeping your animation culturally translatable can be a challenge: here’s what we do to overcome it.

Less Is More: Writing For International Audiences

Animations are all about enacting narratives through action, not words. But that doesn’t mean text doesn’t enter the equation. Sometimes it’s helpful to label things in a visual metaphor, especially when trying to visualize more complex topics, like software or technology. See how Avnet Archive Manager did this in their animated business video below:

During translation, replacing text could mean creating multiple versions of the same video, each in different languages targeted for a specific international audience. In some cases, this investment may be worth it, especially if your company has a strong foothold in a certain country, or want to establish a bigger presence there with more targeted video.

However, using voiceover instead of on-screen text could serve as a more budget-friendly alternative with the same results. Instead of creating multiple animations, you could opt to record several different voice tracks instead, while the animation remains accessible to all audiences. For example, in the video below, voiceover is used to tell the story of “06” a wolf that goes on an incredible journey. By using storytelling with voiceover and imagery to connect with viewers rather than text labels, the video can easily be re-dubbed for a foreign language audience.

Engage International Audiences Without Alienating

If you’re aiming to engage viewers in Mexico, Japan, France, Nigeria, and Sri Lanka, you may not want all your characters as monochromatic as can be. The world is a big, beautiful, diverse place—your animation should reflect that.

Different parts of the world have their own unique styles of animation and animation trends. If you’re creating video for audiences in different countries, it may be worth understanding what types of video styles different people connect to most.

While your characters needn’t look a Hands Across the World coalition, they should allow your audience to see themselves in your work. One approach is to use iconic design and imaginative colors, like gTeam did in their explainer video below.

Animations That Transcend Local Cultures

As incomprehensibly vast as the globe is, it’s actually pretty manageable these days. Crafting an animation that resonates equally with audiences on each continent takes careful consideration, but it’s well within your grasp. Take these lessons to heart and watch your video become a global sensation.

The post Connecting International Audiences With Animated Video appeared first on IdeaRocket.

Tom’s Planner: A Simple Project Planning Tool

Denise Recalde — Mon, 18 May 2015 15:29:46 +0000

This is the first in a series of articles looking at service-providers IdeaRocket partners with.

Here at IdeaRocket we love producing quality animation. But it is a challenge. Great animation is a time-consuming process that needs to combine artistic flair with military precision. As we grow as a studio we have to juggle multiple projects at once and know where each video we are producing is along our production pipeline.

Animations go through multiple stages of production. The following video shows a single project in three separate stages of the process:

Managing the process

This process has to be closely coordinated, with every step ready to go when the previous stage is finished. That’s where Tom’s Planner comes in. Tom’s Planner is a Gantt-style project management web app that allows us to manage each of our productions and know at a glance where each project is along the pipeline. It allows us to easily coordinate our team, keep clients informed of their video’s production, and make sure nothing is missed in the animation process.

“It’s simple to use and simple to look at. Anyone can learn to use it in a few minutes,” says Nick Esposito, IdeaRocket’s Studio Manager. “It creates visually appealing and easily understandable charts and timelines for projects, and it is extremely affordable. It’s easier to use than Microsoft Project, and quicker to set up than Microsoft Excel. Other software is too cumbersome and not as helpful.”

You can see how easy it is to use by playing around with the example available on the webpage. With the right-click menus you can add project stages, meeting and milestones, and using drag-and-drop you can change the length of any of the project stages. It does not require training as more extensive programs such as Microsoft Project do.

Tom on Tom’s Planner

This ease of use is what made Thomas Ummels invent Tom’s Planner in 2009. “Previously I had been working as a project manager for 6 years and one of the things that bothered me most as a project manager was the often-frustrating process of making Gantt Charts,” Tom told me over email. “The available software was mostly way too complicated and had manuals of over a thousand pages and so lots of people made Gantt charts in Excel which was far from ideal and cost a lot of time. So I decided to try and develop a tool that would do a better job. Something simple but super effective.”

It is also this accessibility that Tom believes is behind the success of the software. “It might not have all the bells and whistles that our competitors have but it’s so much easier to use and for 90% of all projects you don’t need any fancy features. Usually you just need a simple tool to do the job fast and effectively. That’s what Tom’s Planner allows you to do,” says Tom.

After Tom invented the program his friends started using his software, nicknaming the tool Tom’s Planner, before he released a beta version for anyone and everyone. “It’s used for a really wide variety of things. We have several fortune 500 companies, government agencies, universities, banks and high tech companies using the tool. But also single freelancers that use the tool for their own business,” says Tom, “It’s used for big projects like the moving of entire offices, building projects, large IT projects etc. But also for small personal projects like rebuilding a house, weddings or a road trip. We also see people managing their resources with it. A helicopter company plans all their flights in our tool and others use it to keep track of the vacation days of their employees.”

Attractive as well as intuitive

Another reason we chose Tom’s Planner as our project management tool is that it looks great.

For Denise McArthur, one of IdeaRocket’s account managers, this means she can share these charts with our clients gladly. “It looks professional and is appealing to the client as it is right there in front of them and to the point – here are the deliverables and the deadlines,” says Denise.

Using the Planner in the sales cycle

The Gantt charts Tom’s Planner produces can also help earlier on in the process. Dan Englander was IdeaRocket’s first-ever employee, helping to build the animation house in New York and bringing in the first big clients that established the business. He has since founded his own sales consultancy practice, Sales Schema, in the Washington, D.C. area and written a book, Mastering Account Management, sharing his sales and marketing wisdom.

He was the first to use Tom’s Planner at IdeaRocket and continues to use it, both as a project management tool, and as a sales tool. “It is great as a sales tool,” says Dan, “It is great to visualize how people will work with you. It helps to bring people into the sales cycle and ties people to a particular timeframe because it is hard for people to conceptualize how long it will take to get something done.”

The nuts and bolts

Licensing comes in three flavors. For the always winning price of free you can use Tom’s Planner as an individual, planning a single project. At $9 per month, you get the Professional version, where you can manage up to 20 different projects and invite others to collaborate. For $19 per month you can get the Unlimited version that IdeaRocket uses, allowing you to manage as many projects as you need, collaborate fully with others, and add as many project members as you see fit.

So whether you are NASA needing to plan your next mission to mars, a student scheduling time for dissertation writing between parties, or an animation studio producing awesome explainer videos, Tom’s Planner can help you manage your projects and help deliver you, your clients, or Martians what they want.

The post Tom’s Planner: A Simple Project Planning Tool appeared first on IdeaRocket.

Flipbooks, Emmys, & Star Wars: A Conversation With Scott Strong

Denise Recalde — Tue, 24 Mar 2015 14:59:19 +0000

“I was always the kid who could draw,” says Scott Strong, lifelong animator. “I’d create little flipbooks in the corners of my textbook pages. They were just stick figures, but they’d bounce into frame, jump on a trampoline, bang their head on the page corners.”

An animator at IdeaRocket for years, Scott and I sat down to discuss how he entered the industry, how it’s changed, and what he’s working on in his free time.

GL: Did you always imagine yourself working in animation?

SS: No, not at all. I never expected to get into it as a real career, even though in a weird way I wanted to my entire life. Even though I really enjoyed it as a kid, I was discouraged from a career in the arts. I grew up as a military brat, moving from place to place—my father was in the Navy, and when I got older, I went into the Navy myself, where I had a career for five years.

GL: Do you feel like your time in the military informs your approach todays?

SS: Oddly enough, yes. I’m a veteran of Desert Shield—I was serving on an aircraft carrier, the USS Independence, as an operations specialist. I worked on radar; you’d have to plot this point of contact on a circular graph, and then plot where it was three minutes later, and again and again, figuring out what direction it was traveling in. In a funny way, it was almost like animation.

GL: How did you make the transition to animation?

SS: While I was serving, I slowly realized I didn’t want to pursue a career in the Navy. I started hanging out with an artsy crowd and began to remember that this was something I used to be really good at.

I started drawing again and my friends encouraged me. They were the ones who made me seriously think about going to college for it. Soon enough, I made my decision and went to Parsons School of Design in New York City.

GL: I saw that you worked on KaBlam! for Nickelodeon—that’s a bit of a cult classic for my generation of millennials. What was that experience like?

SS: It was a revelation. That was actually my first animation job straight out of school. I was living in Brooklyn, commuting to New Jersey to work on it at the illustrator’s place, in his basement and garage. We created the Henry and June comic book inspired interstitials. I was just amazed that there we were, just four people, making this TV show.

I was instantly seduced. I had an interest in animation my whole life, grew up a big fan of Disney, Looney Tunes, and comics, but it never really became a real career option until that day. I worked on KaBlam! for the first season, then got a job in Manhattan at Magnet Pictures.

GL: That’s where you won your Emmy, right?

SS: (Laughs). Yes, we were nominated three times and won twice. We won for the intro animation for The Rosie O’Donnell Show. Actually, I also worked as a background painter for Scholastic on a team that was nominated for an Emmy.

GL: That’s amazing!

SS: There wasn’t a lot of glitz and glamor. My statues came in a box delivered to my house—we didn’t get to go to the ceremony or anything.

GL: Do you feel like animation has changed a lot since you started working in the industry?

SS: Absolutely, it has. When I first started, people were still working with sheets of paper—we were just beginning to scan them and color them on the computer. I’ve watched it go from a very tactile medium to something that’s completely digital. Folks used to work with Oxberry stands: the artist would draw, take their work to this table with a camera mounted above it, and record the frame manually.

GL: Do you feel any nostalgia for the tactile days?

SS: No, not really—I was always a bit more progressive and forward-thinking. I wanted more things to go digital. Ironically though, today I’d like to see a little less emphasis on the big blockbuster 3D movies where everything’s modeled and rounded and perfect. I’ve always been enamored with the 2D aesthetic—I think it has more to offer than what you’re seeing now from feature films.

I’m a big fan of this French school, Gobelins. Their students produce outstanding animations every year. I recently made a short, Toasted Coconut, that’s available online. It’s very much going for that handcrafted feel.

The boy in it is actually my older son. Toasted Coconut is a children’s book company owned by some friends of mine. I had free reign on it, creatively speaking. It was a really satisfying passion project.

GL: Do you have any other passion projects?

SS: I’m producing the opener for my wife’s video blog on YouTube called My Great Challenge—that’s been a lot of fun. I also made a funny Star Wars video in my front yard for my kids. I’ve got two boys, thirteen and eight years old.

GL: Did having kids change your perspective on animation at all?

SS: Yes and no. I get into any project I’m working on, but in terms of what I want to see on TV, I’d like to see more educational shows for young kids. Blue’s Clues and Sesame Street are a lot of fun, but they also teach really valuable, concrete lessons to children. Same goes for shows directed at older kids—I’d like to see more lessons woven in, making academics feel more accessible. More and more, you see just noise on TV—I get that it’s appealing, but now I think about how its affecting kids at that age.

GL: What’s the most gratifying thing about animation, in your eyes?

SS: For me, I’ve always loved that it’s artwork that moves. I used to go to Parsons’ senior thesis shows to reconnect to those roots and see what people are making. I’ll go to a museum, see a painting, and, being an animator, just imagine how it’d move and inhabit its own world.

That’s very gratifying to me. One of the biggest challenges in my line of work is taking this still, soulless thing and injecting it with life. That’s why animating literally means, bringing something to life. It’s art that moves and lives. It’s alive.

The post Flipbooks, Emmys, & Star Wars: A Conversation With Scott Strong appeared first on IdeaRocket.

Denise Recalde, Author at IdeaRocket

Connecting International Audiences With Animated Video

Less Is More: Writing For International Audiences

Engage International Audiences Without Alienating

Animations That Transcend Local Cultures

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!

Tom’s Planner: A Simple Project Planning Tool

Managing the process

Tom on Tom’s Planner

Attractive as well as intuitive

Using the Planner in the sales cycle

The nuts and bolts

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!

Flipbooks, Emmys, & Star Wars: A Conversation With Scott Strong

Receive our free eBook when you sign up for our newsletter!