What is Clari - A 2D Animation Film

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VM collaborated with Clari Inc. to create the new brand film for the tech companies website.

Clari approached VM to create a next-level explainer video for the home page of their newly re-designed website. The initial question was 2D or 3D? What style of animation would tell the story best with visuals that compliment the narrative instead of distract from it? 2D with simple 3D elements was the consensus.

Clari's creative team wanted to take elements from their new branding pack and use graphics, typography, and live action to tell the story. The motion was to be refined but not overly playful.

In the creative brief, Clari made it clear of the most important objective of this film: That anyone watching the film understands what Clari is and what it's used for.

One of the biggest challenges in creating custom animation films is making sure everyone is on the same page in terms of vision from storyboard through final animation. Thankfully, Clari has an A+ creative team that helped us define the style early in the workflow. Creative Director Ian Ashenbremer created a beautiful v1 storyboard to get the ball rolling. Below is an excerpt:

Our team took the v1 storyboard and began to flush out the ideas with a pencil and paper:

Having a clear storyboard from Clari was a huge win for the entire collaboration. VM took the initial storyboard from Ian and flushed it out one more level by bringing it from drawing to simple digital illustrations. Below you can see some frames from the v2 storyboard.

It was important for the animation to lean heavily into the core branding of Clari for consistency across the website. The film needed to be a visual manifestation of Clari as a brand and not stray too far from their foundational elements. With that said, Clari gave us lots of flexibility around defining and creating a new style of animation and sound design.

So who was the audience for this film? Up until recently, Clari was marketed to the C-Suite. The tech company is now marketing to executives, front line manager, reps, and those new personas who run revenue for companies. So the look now would need to feel more B2C instead of B2B.

We decided to lock in music and voice over first to create the base layer the animation was built on top of. This also allowed our animation team to time story beats to matching music moments.

Once we finished a round of feedback on storyboard v2, we move to fully developed style frames. The tool of choice for style frames was Adobe Illustrator. Below are some style frames from out first round:

Once style frames were signed off on, we moved to animation. Adobe After Effects was the tool of choice to take the Illustrator files and breathe life into them.

Because we were on the same page with Clari throughout the workflow, feedback on the first version of the animation was minimal and contributed to hitting the deadline for the project.

Regular communication and collaboration is the key!