Creating A Product Explainer Animation
I was approached by Pigeon Posted to create a piece of short-form video content, to explain what their product is and how it works. Here’s a short breakdown of the project.
Brief
They had created a novel new take on personal correspondence, a letter/envelope combo inspired by origami. The user writes their note on the sheet, folds it into an envelope and posts. ‘Write. Fold. Send.’ A product which is its own packaging.
The issue was that they didn’t have anything to visualise how it actually worked and how charming it could be. Copy is one expression, but it really needed something in the way of an explainer video for promotion.
Shooting video was one option, but I thought that stop motion animation would be a playful and quirky alternative befitting of the product. To which the company agreed. Instead of shooting this as a continual video, it could be broken down into a series of polished single images. The benefit being that I could treat this as if it were a photoshoot; lighting could be heavily controlled and refined, post-processing could be done through Capture One to receive the same level of attention a single image would. In fact, only a single frame would need to be processed, the adjustments then copied across all frames.
A representation of the style I was striving to achieve. Very minimal; pastel colours and clean lighting to keep it strictly product focused.
Production & Lighting
Behind the scenes shot of the set. (btw those black bags on the table are to pull the wrinkles from the paper.)
The lighting was to be clean, high key with minimal shadows which is easier said than done when you consider how close the subjects are to the background. This was a problem solved through broad, soft lighting; one key light above and two fills working to fill in the pockets of shadow on either side which would be cast by the product and models hands.
I mounted the camera on the boom arm as a means to get the camera high enough to get all content in frame, also to gain enough focal distance to use a 50mm lens (chosen for sharp image reproduction). An 85mm was used for the close-up section of the stamp which you will see shortly.
To shoot this, I had a model slowly go through the process of writing and folding the product as I continually shot frame after frame as quickly as the flash could recycle. Shooting in this manner was ideal because if any part of the folding process took too long, frames could be removed in post to shorten the duration. You may notice from the BTS image that I was tethering the camera to my laptop too. This is common practice for all of my shoots but the main benefit here being that I could scroll through all images in quick succession to get a crude view of the animation.
After processing all images, I loaded them into Premiere, found a fitting royalty-free instrumental among a few other final touches and voila…
Final animation
You can find their product range over on their site: PigeonPosted.com