Food Systems
I met Charles Brepsant through the School of Motion Network. He and his co-founder, Jay Burton, run OneStop, a Swiss based agency that embraces collaboration between creatives from all fields. They do amazing and important work, and are fantastic, down-to-earth clients.
Charles and Jay were working with their long time client, the United Nations Environment Protection Agency to create several videos around food systems – a topic I know shockingly little about even though I live in Iowa… They were swamped with other client projects, so I was brought on board to lend a hand with designing and animating key moments and sequences that (hopefully!) encouraged organizations worldwide to collaborate and find more sustainable approaches. At this time I had been working a LOT for Financial Institutions and Healthcare Insurers, so getting to work on a project that focused on global sustainability was a breath of fresh air.
Style Frame Designer / Animator
As creatives themselves, Charles and Jay understood that micro-management isn’t always (or ever…) great for the creative process — they gave me a level of trust and autonomy that I appreciated and really allowed me run and shape the work. I was provided with initial visual explorations and storyboards but they gave me the thumbs up to redesign the boards from the ground up. With the brand guide and script in hand, I was up and running.
While grabbing visual references, I encountered an amazing piece: Re:wild- What is a Ranger? - a series of videos that brought awareness to the challenges that park rangers face. It felt incredibly analogous and relevant to the United Nations and food systems. And they are gorgeous videos.
With this inspiration locked in, I revisited the style frames with an eye for collage, ripped & textured paper, off-kilter compositions and other visual ways that I could make the sequences feel handcrafted and personal.
During my Management Consulting days, I discovered that for an audience that spends the majority of their work days buried in Powerpoints and spreadsheets, showing them something unexpectedly bold and creative is a sure way to get their attention! So I did just that, I gave them in-your-face bold colors, energetic type treatments, whimsical icons animations, and dynamic scene transitions. I was feeling really great about how the project was shaping up!
Unfortunately, halfway through the engagement, the client decided to go a different direction and opted to focus on a series of interviews with key stakeholders. This project never saw the light of day (except for here!), and I’m incredibly proud of it and my partnership with OneStop.