For my third year creative directing the content at Next we worked in tandem with Jorge Estrada and the gang at Ordinary Folks to concept and animate around the constantly changing stage narrative at Next ’19. This project was featured on AdAge’s list of best experiential for 2019.
We learned from previous years that if we were going to have success with an animated show, we needed to create an asset library that was both simple and flexible.
We concepted a plethora of visual metaphors based off of the rough scripts we had. Assets were then shuffled around until moments before Sundar took stage.
Designing the actual visuals was the easiest part of our job. The challenge was in creating a narrative thread between the dozens of disparate scripts and teams that would share the stage at Next.
We helped the teams at Cloud shape their story arcs and distill them into something that would be easily digestible for the tens of thousands tuning-in.
We were constantly storyboarding and sketching, using our simple shape language to illustrate vast concepts such as migration, security, and evolution.
In 2018 it was our job to break through the expected 16:9 format and tell a more dynamic story on four giant rotating LED cubes.
There were symbols. The brand team at Google did a fantastic job designing a package of stylized glyphs that we translated across the four cubes to tell our story. A crop for a photo, an animated infographic, or a sweeping transition — it all started with this language.
To create a system that works, you spend a lot of time breaking things. You can only find the ‘do’s’ when you spend a lot of time realizing the ‘don’ts’.
We introduced broad rules and stress tested them all in one pipeline. A process that we were only able to discover through years of experience on this particular project.
