The International Studies Association, an organization dedicated to understanding international, transnational and global affairs, has been a long time partner of ATION. For the spring of 2018, ISA gave our team the opportunity to create original content to be used by the association for their annual conference.

When stepping into our first meeting, ISA left the door completely open as to what our team could tackle for them as long as it pertained to their annual convention. We threw around different ideas throughout the meeting, including revamping their website, creating designs for their 60th annual conference, and updating their social media accounts. At the end of the meeting, ISA’s social media manager brought up her need for an introductory “How To…” video that could help ISA members prepare for the annual conference. After some discussion, our team decided to take on the challenge and began working on a “How To…” video- as well as a small side project making a YouTube tutorial video for the staff at ISA to kick-start their YouTube channel.

Our team’s organizers, Nicole Harvey and Skylar Agnello were in charge of the overall organization and completion of each task. Skylar was the main source of communication between the team and ISA, while Nicole was the same with ATION supervisor Bill Congdon.

Our team began the project by drawing up an initial storyboard, which we quickly presented in our second meeting with ISA. The storyboard was well received, but the staff at ISA felt there was too much information that needed to be stated; so splitting the video into two would be the perfect fix. We agreed, and got to work on two new storyboards for each video, the first on how to prepare before the conference, and the second on what to do after the conference. After an email of approval from the ISA on the “Pre-Conference” storyboard, Nicole, Joe, and Skylar created short 15-second example clips of different styles that the animation could be made in and sent them to ISA for their selection. After some deliberation, ISA decided on the “professional yet simplistic” option provided by Joe, and thus the project was sent off to animator Jimmy Brockett to begin.

The only roadblock our team faced was with time. Due to the ISA staff being busy with the conference, we were unable to get some of the feedback we needed as quickly as we would have hoped. Thus, we were forced to drop the second animation, as we would not have been able to complete it within the scheduled time frame. Instead, we put more work into our YouTube tutorial, created by our team’s Joe Schiro.

Despite this roadblock, our team pulled through to create a beautiful and fluid animated “How To…” video and YouTube tutorial, and in lieu of ISA’s potential future with ATION, left ISA with the storyboard of the second video for future use.

Project Team
Skylar Agnello
Jimmy Brockett
Nicole Harvey
Joseph Schiro