Great Uses for Motion Graphics & Animation

We’ve created a new corporate video for Odenza Marketing Group, a local travel incentive company. The new video features a healthy dose of motion graphics intercut with video interviews with Odenza's clients -- but why did we opt for motion graphics over traditional video footage captured on-camera?

Motion graphics can be used for several reasons. Some use them for eye candy, which is fine -- but that often becomes a case of style masking a lack of content: a lot of flash but little substance. When style and content meet harmonically together, then you're achieving the overall purpose of video as a communication medium. The medium is the message, wrote McLuhan -- and so, one great reason to use motion graphics is that it can give visual expression to abstract ideas or processes. Motion graphics are iconic, and so symbols, signs, and graphics – the semiotics of the video world, as it were – express the ideas in a way that’s easy to remember.

The trick, of course, is to come up with a concise and clear visual concept for the script’s ideas and processes; in Odenza’s case, they provided only the narration that they wanted to be heard, but no input as to the onscreen elements that would be used to express it. The task of storyboarding and designing the graphics, then, fell in our lap.

A key example of a challenging process to express visually happens at the end of our video. Odenza’s scripted narration says, “Everything from additional hotel nights, airfares, entertainment passes, car rentals… we can sort it all out for them in one phone call. Your customers choose how they want to vacation. We make it happen.” The spoken duration is about 15 seconds… That’s a lot of content to convey in a small amount of time!

How would you express those ideas concisely and clearly? Check out our solution on our portfolio page at: http://pacificproducersgroup.com/portfolio/odenza-motion-graphics -- the section starts at about the 2 minute mark.