The future depends on what you do today.
– Mahātmā Gandhi

 

The idea of ‘layers’ for me is pretty simple. Imagine building a house from it’s foundation up to the roof, that’s essentially how I see our content sometimes. When getting a new project to work on, I firstly have to translate the client’s needs into what needs to be done and then define how we will do it. The better foundation you set, the better the results will be. An impressive piece can’t stand on a shaky ground.

 

Let your content evolve by adding more layers to it.

 

As an example, I will take the most recent one, which was the SoFi sponsored piece for the Florida Mutineers, brand under the wing of Misfits and competing in the CDL 2020.

 

 

These were the notes and breakdown for a 30s animated piece taken on a 1 hour call between the leaders of the project Mata (Art Director), James (Creative Director), Nikola (Production Manager) and I after syncing about the availability of the team, timeline for every step of the process and setting responsibilities. As you can see we internally set up the deadline of 27 working days but ended up doing the work within 14 (including overtime work and weekends). As we built a proper foundation up with clear responsibilities, our team knew every step of the way to the final piece immediately, every layer of it and the rest was just the execution.

 

We spent 1 hour breaking this process down and making sure we have enough resources and time to pull off what we wanted to create. As you can see, each step has a person in charge, other contributors, rough deadline and clear tasks.

 

Another challenging part of this project was that multiple stakeholders had a say in its final look (Misfits creative team, SoFi, Activision Blizzard). We broke down every single piece of work in advance and communicated it to the client. That had to be done in order to minimize the risk of failures as the deadline was super aggressive and the style we wanted to use was very challenging. There were close to no bumps on the road there.

 

Visual mood board. This gave us a direction for the aesthetics & feel we want to go for in this video.

 

We were fortunate enough that the Misfits creative team was amazing enough and that SoFi liked the piece all along the way, but our experience as a team (and failures from the past) helped us get to a point where we were able to communicate the whole process beforehand, send updates in a timely manner and also make sure everyone on our team is contributing in the most efficient manner.

 

This is where we drew an inspiration out of for SkyZ as a character.

 

SkyZ Character exploration.

 

SkyZ Character evolvement.

 

Below you can see an initial animatic as well as the comparison between the animatic (which was presented early on to the client) and a final, polished product side by side. This is a perfect example of how ‘layers’ work and how your content can grow if everyone involved knows the direction, the timeline and their clear responsibilities.

 

Animatic which served as a foundation for the piece. Props to James for the voiceover.

 

Final vs Animatic.

 

For the closure, I will toss you another unrelated quick example, a mini-breakpage slide out of Red Bull’s branding guidelines for the esports athletes we created. This is essentially a comparison of how things look like when I do them alone and after I’ve talked to the designers I love working with and why it’s important to have great people on your team. You might not be able to create something so well designed (I certainly am not), even in the form of a very minimalistic looking break page (which goes in line with the Red Bull branding), but you can surely set the direction for it. I know this example is very simple, but it shows you why you should always set a visual direction for your team. The results will always be better when you work as a team and add more layers to the piece.

 

Me with a beautifully laid out direction (top image, lol), and a beautiful design work that followed up after a quick discussion of what this can look like.

 

If you are interested in learning more about certain steps laid out above and see more content, feel free to reach out! I’m happy to explain any individual step you have interest in further.