The decision to use After Effects
When making the decision on if it’d be best to workaround the fact that A/V will need a shareable video instead of a live deck or work with it, I’d ask myself and others, “why swat a fly (make a deck) with a diesel-train (After Effects)?” Since my natural inclination was to ‘go big,’ I wanted to challenge that instinct before fully leaning into something this ambitious. After a few conversations with the rest of my team, the organizer, the other visual designers, and design leadership— leaning into this just made sense.
A lot of the internal design work at the time was focused on elevating and increasing brand moments, serving the larger goal of making Upgrade “the place to be” as an employer. Responding to the video constraint as ‘okay well, we’ll just make it an actual video’ was aligned with that premise. Since this was going to be a large ambient display that would be passively playing, a higher level of control and power was needed to help see its potential.
Finding the best direction to take
I wanted to take full advantage of the fact that it was being built in a software as capable as After Effects, while still embracing the theme by keeping things rooted in the 1920s.
The content for the deck came from a mixture of sources (including our team’s own data, metrics and wins from other teams, and milestones). Despite everybody's best efforts, there were a few delays with getting all of the content ready. While incomplete, I had enough information to go off of to begin ideating two different narrative directions to take.
- A people-centered, win-driven narrative that reinforces the goal of highlighting individual contributions and accomplishments.
- A numbers-centered, growth-driven narrative that illustrates the year’s strong performance as a company, and recognizes the accomplishments of the location’s different teams.
I sketched out two approaches to each of the possible narratives to get some of the prep-work out of the way ahead of the content being finalized.
A people-centered narrative that's visually close to home
The people-centered narrative would focus heavily on achievements and topics local to the service center.
Because of this, I wanted to anchor this with an Art Deco-style cityscape scene with a modified version of the building's illustration used in the Phoenix location pictogram. Different objects such as billboards and zeppelins act as vehicles for different story components such as shoutouts, wins, and highlights. To give things a dynamic quality, the camera would shift to different sides of the building depending on the topic.
A flexible, numbers-centered narrative inspired by early film
The idea for the people-centered narrative was highly ambitious and relied heavily on a standardized form of delivery. The numbers-centered narrative embraced the variation of the content and took heavy inspiration from historically-accurate techniques in order to do so.
Since the videa is an ambient visual that won’t have a dedicated watch time, people’s attention will be coming in and out. Like most types of storytelling, visual storytelling relies on a linear story arc to see a narrative through; in this case, I won't be able to rely on the audeince's long-term attention so the storytelling will need to overcome this.
To help guide finding an on theme solution, I took cues from the storytelling practices and title/dialogue cards of the Silent Era. Popular silent films at the time managed to deliver resonant stories by following short, visually rich clips with dialogue cards that can be read quickly. Despite the fragmented nature of how the story is delivered, the use of straightforward and consistent aesthetics helps create a common thread.
Based on the content that was already available and the deck from the year before, I sketched out a "storycard" template system that uses the party pattern as the visual common thread. There are 6 different content templates to fill the content area, each of which are tailored to the thematic needs of the content.
Due to this approach's flexibility, simplicity, and historical inspiration, I decided to pursue this approach.
While the people-centered narrative could've been a captivating showcase (and really fun to make), its need for new illustrations and content standardization would be a time-consuming effort to do well. The numbers-centered narrative worked with the variation of the content and required less additional work, meaning more time could be spent on elevation rather than just the basics.
Add surface motion
The content for this direction will use a leafless version of the pattern as its primary surface. As the visual commonthread, it was important to figure out the motion design for this first.
I wanted to give the surface a sense of movement and liveliness to make the viewing experience more immersive. I explored three possible directions:
Film jitter
Inspired by the rickety quality of old projectors, where the film "jumps" or "jitters" due to poor lens stabilization or unbalanced rigs.
While inspired by real antique characteristics, this cheapened the look a bit. While the assets for this party have been no stranger to using digital tools to mimic analogue limitations, this might've taken it a line too far.
Golden sheen
To explore the possibility of making this one of the few day-of gold moments, I applied the gold gradient to the pattern and animated a light sweep going across every 3 seconds.
This aligned more with creating a subtle but perceivable motion to the pattern, however I found that this broke the silent film dialogue card association a bit.
Ray rotation
This concept was a direct result of my asking myself "what would I do if I only had 1920s technology at my disposal?" Early animation came from each frame being drawn and traced out by hand, and I saw an opportunity to capture that frame-by-frame quality by rotating the rays.
While I obviously still used the conveniences of digital tools, I used a persistence of motion illusion rather than a simple rotation animation to create this effect. To do this, I set up a loop of three different background states of the rays rotated in increments of 2.5º. I experimented with each state’s frame rate before landing on a simple 1 frame per state.
Play speed (1 state per frame)
Slowed down (1 state per 15 Frames)
Design core instances and motions
To make sure I knew what needed to be done for each slide, I started off by organizing each piece of content by its theme, and designing templates to populate, the main categories were:
Now that I had my static templates designed, I started to build the motion design for the individual story elements.
Since the main focus of this event is appreciating the work of Upgrade’s Operations teams, I wanted the team welcomes to be the most visually compelling. For these, I took inspiration from one of Technicolor's "Color by Technicolor" cards. While not entirely historically aligned (
from what I could find, my source was from the 1960s) there were some heavy Art Deco influences in the type treatment that I wanted to emulate.
To riff on the pinwheel in the background, the department’s illustration reveal gives the appearance of it barreling forward by scaling up and rotating at the same time. Its final state is tilted at a 15º angle. Once the illustration finishes, the welcome text reveals itself while scales down with its opacity increasing, giving the illusion of the text materializing and floating in like a cloud. Both elements are then scaled down at the same time to remove them, which was maintained throughout the deck as an out transition.
For the people welcome, I wanted it to have a similar intro card look but a little more subdued. A common technique in early animation was treating the mask as a physical element. I decided to do a similar thing by having the headshot scale up from the center as a circle, to mimic it floating up to prominence. Once the circle reaches full width, the shape mask will change to a U-shield while moving to the right.
I also decided to establish the standard text reveal instance, since the team welcome text animation and treatment will remain specific to those slides. Since many of the image and text slides use a 2 column grid, I animated the text to fade in and move to the left from behind the image.
Large wins and large metrics had two separate treatments based on whether it was Ops-centered or generally business focused.
The Ops-centered variants use a 2 column image and text composition to make these pieces of content more of a focal point. Since the images used here will be illustration, I combined the illustration reveal animation established in the team welcomes with the text reveal animation established in the people welcomes.
For the business focused variants, I kept the composition simple with center justified text and a fade in animation. While
Business-Centered Variants
Large metric reveal slides also had a counting-up animation applied to give the number more visual interest.
Since the team wins varied from team to team, I also decided to keep the design and animation of this composition simple and open ended. To accomplish this, I kept the standard limited to establishing header and body placement with the body content arranged in a flexible grid. Reveal animations would be kept simple by using an opacity fade-in.
Large Metric Reveal Example
Now that that the core instances were designed and templatized, I was ready to start mapping out the storyarc to put the full thing together.
Map out the story and put it all together
To kick off the storyboarding process, I mapped out the basic narrative arc based on the content of the different categories. Staying consistent with the plan to create little vignettes that can populate a larger story arc, I decided to keep things relatively aligned with this categorization.
Additionally, I knew that I wanted the team-specific content to act as the climax. With that goal in mind, I constructed the rest of the story to work up to and come down from that narrative high point.
I started things off by welcoming leadership first. This made sure these pleasantries were extended and set the stage for the importance of this event without making their presence the focus.
From there, I used some of the large metrics and wins related to Phoenix and Operations to help ground the story in showing gratitude for the work done this year. This included reinforcing the office’s total headcount (the office growing from 200 team members to over 1,000 in 5 years had been quite the internal spectacle,) and highlighting the investment in people’s growth by showing the number of promotions and a learning and development win.
To further connect with the overarching story, I decided to have customer testimonials next. Headcount, promotions, and development wins can be compelling, but only to those with the full context of what that means. Using customer testimonials seemed like an additional way to reinforce the central theme of positive performance and growth, but appeals more to the story’s pathos.
I saw these first few sections as the exposition and rising action of the overall story. For the climax, I paired the team welcomes with the team accomplishments. Even though the team accomplishments are the center point for the climax, these story components had to be relatively self-contained as vignettes.
To balance the two priorities, it made sense to open with a team’s respective welcome as both a hook and introduction for their accomplishments, and then further separate each team by following with a related win/business metric before moving to the next team. Using this strategy helped construct miniature story arcs within the climax, accomplishing the goal of keeping things self-contained while contributing to a central story.
At this point, all that was left were quite a few company-wide accomplishments. I saved these until the end because I felt that they did a good job of bringing all the localized story components together in a way that said “this is how the work has been marked in company history.” Putting this at the beginning could’ve accomplished a lot of what the customer testimonials and local wins did, but having it follow the executive welcomes would’ve made this seem more top-heavy than it should be. Since the video was going to loop, saving this for the end still keeps it proximal to the executive welcomes— creating a looping visual narrative with a circular arc.
The final video itself was over 17 minutes long and contained some confidential information. Below is an abridged version containing a single person intro, the three exposition wins, a single team climax, three falling action wins, and a single resolution win. This is to demonstrate the sequencing and give an idea of how all the elements came together.
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