Spring 2018

My Gene Counsel came to us with a problem which we were tasked to solve. The problem given to us was the word of My Gene Counsel not being spread. The client offered some ideas as to how we should approach the project. Some of the ideas given were considered but ultimately decided to be less than desirable for a deliverable product. After talking to the client and negotiating their vision and the most effective way to portray the company, we came to a decision and began animating the video. My Gene Counsel previously had an informational video made, but it was generic and did not portray the company in the best possible light. So we started storyboarding, discussing with our contact at the company Ellen, and designing a video that fit the company brand the best. This process was accompanied by building assets in Adobe Illustrator, creating the script and working on edits with the client, hiring a voice actor, animating in After Effects and putting all the pieces together in Adobe Premiere. This took a lot of coordination and communication from the team. But by the end of the project, we had completed and delivered an exceptional video. Our client was thrilled and even asked our team if we were looking for jobs in the future. Overall the project was a success, the client was happy, and our team learned a lot.

At the beginning of the semester, the client came to us with the task of creating an advertisement / animation. The problem this video would solve would be the lack of people knowing about the company and the benefits of its use. The animation was to utilize the color scheme of the “My Gene Counsel” logo. This animation was meant to attract young and old potential clients. Ellen, the CEO who we spoke with expressed that we take into account every age, gender, and ethnicity. We were given an old animated video made previously for the company and were told to follow it as a guideline.

Taking into consideration the client’s problem, we decided to take a simplistic approach to the issue. After researching the target audience we found that because My Gene Counsel goes after clients who have used products such as “My Ancestry” we decided to look into their target audience. We found, however that the primary buyer and target client to these products were middle aged white men. Our client, on the other hand, wanted to appeal to all genders, ethnicities, and ages. In order to remedy this discrepancy we took a simplistic approach which kept all characters blue. While matching the logo for My Gene Counsel, the blue characters also allowed us to bypass the need to represent every race while still appealing to a vast amount of demographics. Another issue we found was the video given by the client was not only an eye sore, but conveyed a poor message when it came to marketing. For this reason we opted to keep the message as straight forward and deliver a more visually appealing art style.

One of the obstacles that we encountered with this project was the program that we would use for our animation. Our CEO, Ellen, wanted our video to look similar to the company’s existing video, which was made using a website called GoAnimate. This site had a very specific look, and a lot of character animation, both of which would be incredibly time-consuming to implement with After Effects, which is the program we ultimately used to create our animation. To satisfy Ellen’s request, we just told her that we would make it look as similar as possible to the GoAnimate video, which we did. We used colors from the MyGeneCounsel logo so that it would be Additionally, part of the reason why it took us until April to begin animating was because of script disagreements. We spent several weeks working with Ellen to reach a script that we both agreed with. Especially at first, we did not see eye-to-eye with the content of the script – Ellen wanted it a specific way, however, we believed that it wasn’t enticing enough for the customer. Her script lacked something that would make customers want to utilize her service, and the tone was a bit odd. She wanted it to be conversational, but it seemed very unnatural. So, we compromised with her, and our script ended up containing a bit of both of our desired content. Ellen also wanted to target every demographic, but we knew that it would be difficult to include everyone, and all races. To solve this, we made the people’s skin blue, so that it doesn’t represent any specific race, removing race entirely.

Overall we feel that we did a good job on this project and were successful in the assignment that we were tasked with. We started out strong by having a strict schedule of when each piece of the process should be done. For the most part we stuck to this and even got ahead of schedule at some points. Towards the end we struggled a bit staying on schedule because our client had a personal emergency and didn’t get back to us for a while. This set us back for the start of animating but we managed to catch up and get everything done on time which was great. There was some difficulty in the script writing process because our client was unclear about what she wanted to convey. After some back and forth about the script we had to become more aggressive in our approach. Through several calls with her we did convince her to go with a script that we were happy with. We also were pretty successful in convincing the client to let us use our creative license more because she did not quite understand at first. In the end she was very happy with what we delivered to her so we are glad we didn’t try to conform to what she thought she wanted. Looking back this might have happened faster if we had made our storyboards more clear. Additionally, we think that we were successful in finding a voice actor and recording the script. At first this seemed a little daunting but through collaboration with the drama department we ended up with a great voice over. In the end we are very happy with the product that we delivered and we learned a lot in the process.

Project Team
Rachel
Maggie Chernovetz
Thomas Davies
Malik Harris
Cameron Sugrue