A safer railroad | Vale

1st video

In August of 2020, I had the chance of making two 30 second videos telling stories of imprudence in railroad crossings, as part of an awareness campaign of the Brazilian company Vale. Each video shows the story of a different character and their decisions when crossing a railroad. The chosen aesthetic was stylized and with a hand-drawn feel. I worked with simpler shapes and the vivid colors of the company. The biggest challenge was to find the balance between the serious theme of the campaign and the look we were after while making sure the message was coming across to the audience.

2nd video

PROCESS

I received the scripts of both videos and the client’s references. I started by putting together a mood board with the colors, elements, reference frames, etc. which worked as a guide for the rest of the process. Then, I made the storyboards considering the structure of the storytelling of each story.

Since I started to study 3D, I began to explore the concept of blocking - making a simple version of your scene with basic geometry (cubes, spheres) so you can experiment more with your scene faster. I decided to apply a version of this to a 2D video, so I could experiment with different sequences of shots to find the best one to tell the story. It also helped as a guide for the final illustration.

I decided to go for a story with a variety of shots, from close-ups to wides, which created new challenges in terms of illustration and animation but made the story much richer and well rounded. My workflow for each shot consisted of vectorizing each element of the scene in Illustrator, using the storyboard frame as a base. Then, I’d transfer the scene to After Effects using the plugin Overlord, so I could animate everything as a shape layer, and apply the final textures and compositing touches.

Another challenge of this kind of 2D aesthetic is how to create depth. To solve that, I added several layers of elements to create parallax when animating and I animated several shape layers to create a ‘fake 3D’ that made sense with the rest of the imagery.