lbella | Acre Family Childcare

Acre Family Childcare

A promotional video created for a local childcare organization.

Acre Family Childcare is a local organization that works with women to train and help them open their own childcare facilities. As part of a final assignment in my motion design course, they visited our class and held a presentation for us about their organization and what they do for the community. The class was separated into groups and we had to create a motion graphics based advertisement for them.

The finished video

Every group in the class managed to go into vastly different directions after the meeting. My group in particular focused on the fact that the presenters had mentioned the phrase "ripple effect" and we decided to use that imagery to tie into Lowell's rivers and mills and general Mill Girls history.

Sketches & Storyboard

In the very beginning the group got together and sketched out some imagery and ideas of what to use for our video. This is where we initially got the idea to make this video lean more on the historical side by pointing out how Lowell has a history of being powered by women.

Once we started getting ideas together, we started gathering more research and putting together a script and statistics about the organization. I started sketching out the storyboard.

Asset Production

An illustrated view of Lowell from the Merrimack River.

Once we had our idea in mind and a storyboard to follow, we got started on asset production. We started to make a list of the specific places around Lowell we needed to illustrate and other things like characters, generic locations, graphs, etc.

Since everyone on the team (it was a group of five of us) was contributing to making assets, we had to put together a document to get everyone on the same page on how everything should look. We made a style guide with a list of Dos & Don'ts, notes on typography, colors and sizes so that way even though different things were made by different people, all the assets looked unified.

A generic school asset.

The full style guide page.

The color scheme. It includes the hex codes which became extremely useful since we had someone on the team who was colorblind.

Characters we made that we used both in the illustration but also as examples for how the people should generally look.

We based our colors and style guide on AFCC's existing style guide, but we allowed ourselves to use more shades of their brand colors.

A snippet from AFCC's official style guide.

Production

My biggest job on this project was assembling and animating the first half of the video while another teammate animated the second half so that way we can get the video done faster. I actually had to work on my half pretty fast in so that way the person who was animating part 2 could pick up where my half left off.

At the time I was still getting used to After Effects but I was getting into it more and more as I worked on this project. With the help of tutorials on youtube, I managed to do what I wanted to do in the short timeframe I had to do it. Here's the part I animated down below:

This part I had to really seek out help and use a tutorial for but I was very pleased with how it came out. I had to find an After Effects tutorial that talked about making water droplet ripple effects so that I could learn how to make the ripple effect I wanted specifically for this part.

I really got a kick out of animating this part because we had a very large brick wall texture that at the time I felt we made but wasn't being used anywhere. So I decided to use it for this beginning sequence where the dialogue didn't seem to have any imagery. I made these small "chalk" illustrations myself as well so I could animate them as if they were being drawn as the dialogue was progressing.

This part I felt was a really cute way to illustrate the statistic of "90% of a child's brain growth happens before age 5" that was being spoken about at this part. We illustrated a real life image of a local mill and I animated it in my part to make it show 9/10 specific lights turn on to emphasize the 90%.

Motion Graphics

Motion Graphics is the newest of the 4 main skills I work with. However, once I learned the tools to make 2D motion graphics it has quickly become one of my most used skills! If you've looked around at other projects I've featured here on my site, you'll quickly see that I've been able to incorporate some kind of motion graphics almost everywhere.