This is a little 2d motion graphics piece in a South Park-style created for the Vehicle Emissions Partnership at West Lothian Council. It was designed to encourage drivers to switch off their engines instead of ‘idling’ but the target audience was primary school-age. (What better way to get drivers to switch off their engines than to have their kids nag them into it?) So I created these little characters and lip-synched them to voiceover with various vehicles demonstrating the problem.

I had to find a way of illustrating pollution so that kids could understand it so I came up with the coughing bird and the sudden changes to monochrome. The other tricky thing was illustrating asthma. This had me stumped for a while until I decided to make the word itself expand and contract as if breathing.

I’m quite fond of idling myself, but I don’t need a car for that.

Categories: 2d Motion Graphics, Business Graphics | Tags: 2d animation, Business Graphics, Motion Graphics, Scotland | No Comments

Kinetic text is a useful technique for when there is a lot of information to report but little in the way of visuals to illustrate it. Sky’s Aspire project was one such case.

An internal video communication, these graphics were used as part of a bigger whole that included interviews with team leaders and progress reports. Business graphics needn’t be dull..

Categories: 2d Motion Graphics, Television Graphics, Business Graphics | Tags: 2d animation, Sky HD, Television Graphics | No Comments

This animation piece was commissioned by Sky Television for a management conference and was screened at the massive O2 Cineworld in London. The video above shows the rushes I created for them and the video below shows how these were used in the overall presentation by Edinburgh’s LA Media.

The idea was to illustrate the communication process between customers, engineers and sales staff and the fibre optic line effect connected the various satellite points in the galaxy.

It wasn’t the simplest of tasks, most notably because of the very short timeframe involved. It’s not every day you get asked ‘can you build us an inter-connecting galaxy by next week?’

Cairn Energy held their Annual General Meeting this week and had been looking for ways of spicing up their annual reports. As the reports detailed their oil and gas exploration work in the Indian subcontinent and in Greenland, it made sense to illustrate these areas with maps.

There are a hundred ways of making maps, and apparently last year they did it with Powerpoint slides, but this year I created these animated 3d flythroughs for them, complete with fluffy clouds.

Overnight their share price soared by 8%. I reckon it was the clouds that did it.

Categories: Business Graphics | Tags: 3d animation, 3d maps, cairn | 1 Comment

Edinburgh-based production company LA Media asked me to produce an animated ident for their video creations and this extended version above is what I delivered.

They had fairly set ideas about the design style – that it should be monochromatic, gritty and urban – and even had some animation examples to show me. This was a bit unusual, but what was more unusual was that they didn’t want me to use their existing logo.

An ident without a logo was not something I was sure I could do, but I enjoy a challenge.  Like other idents, you only use around 5-10 seconds worth but when they gave me the music they were using – by Mike Jameson – I kind of liked looking at the whole thing.

Categories: Business Graphics | Tags: animated idents, la media, logo design | No Comments

This is a compilation of 3d graphics that I created for the insurance giant Aegon. The individual clips were spread throughout a dvd which detailed the company’s employee pension scheme and explained its finer points.

I tried to make the images as engaging as possible whilst remaining close to their branding and getting their sober message across clearly.

The pig may have been a step too far in the other direction. Although they had a piggy bank just like this one in their printed materials, I don’t think they used it in the dvd.

Categories: Business Graphics | Tags: aegon, dvd, insurance | No Comments

This is an excerpt from LA Media’s excellent corporate presentation for the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. At one point in the script there was a need to show the centre’s close proximity to all Edinburgh’s main landmarks and most thriving tourist spots, so I was asked to create this whirlwind tour of the city. In terms of geography, it’s actually reasonably accurate!

To close the presentation I created the fairly simple but effective animation of the EICC logo with it’s square-set forms and letters.

Categories: 3d Animation, Business Graphics | Tags: 3d design, Business Graphics, EICC, Edinburgh, Scotland | No Comments

This presentation piece for Visit Scotland uses three different animation techniques for the three individual areas I was asked to cover: the fluttering ident, the landscape text, and the names that form into words. (These are the names of Visit Scotland employees.)

Each section was created with 3d animation and each brought it’s own challenges. But I have to admit there was something quite satisfying about making that text run along the top of the bridges.

Categories: Business Graphics | Tags: Business Graphics, Scotland, Visit Scotland | No Comments

Corporate broadcasting is becoming increasingly viable over the internet, and businesses are now waking up to the online possibilities for video. Having worked in television and been a seasoned web designer, bringing the two sides together was a natural progression. For this piece of web video by LA Media, I was brought in to assemble all the video elements and help to integrate it with the Scottish Power website.

Categories: Web Video, Business Graphics | Tags: Business Graphics | No Comments

Standard Life were using a marbles theme throughout their printed literature and the natural extension of this was to animate them, to keep their branding consistent across all media. This 3d animation was used in their corporate broadcasting but also looped to create a very effective screensaver.

Categories: Business Graphics | Tags: Business Graphics | No Comments