Recently it was my pleasure to judge entries at the Collision awards – a show dedicated to animation (check it out here). Not only did I get to see great work from all across the planet, but the tonnage of content really made me take a step back and think. Why was this entry better than that one? What was that one doing that this one wasn’t, and why? Why did this one seem to work in the context of the entire entry, and that one just did not? Why does this one just seem kinda, blah? And on and on and on.
Now, to be clear, we were judging entries from a variety of organizations. Some were clients, some were pureplay animation studios, some were advertising agencies, and some were companies in that grey area that shops are increasingly falling into – are they production houses, are they full service, are they some new kind of thing and I just outed myself as a dinosaur who should shut up and go back to judging town crier competitions?
Whoever was making it, there was a lot of great work and my observations about where some entries were lacking fell into three areas which I bucket broadly as the design, the strategy, and the story.
In the design bucket, in some of the work it seemed that the shops were deeply in love with the element, but had no sense of the frame that the element was sitting in. Or said another way, you have a video. You have an animated element within that video, and it is framed by the boundaries of the screen. The animation itself is cool and amazing but it looks like it was just dropped into the frame by a passing bird. No effort was made to incorporate the animation – as an element – into the overall space.
How does the eye track the piece, where do you want them to look and when? Where do you want them to start, where do you want them to finish? All the kinds of things that you think about when you’re working with an element that’s an illustration, a photograph, a type treatment or, god forbid, copy, are not to be thrown out the window just because that element happens to move.
So advice number one – think harder about your animation in the context of the entire frame.
Next, the strategy. Think about your animation in terms of the whole message you’re trying to communicate. This takes the first observation to 11 and it was shocking to me how many entries dropped the ball here. Like, here was this really cool thing, and I had no idea why it was here and it certainly didn’t make me do anything.
Because no matter how cool the animation is, it’s still a servant to some larger goal. The client didn’t hire you to just make a cool thing – she hired you to make a cool thing that would make people do something. David Ogilvy used to say “When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.’” Or said in a way that doesn’t require a degree in Greek history to understand, you don’t want people to just think the animation is cool, you want them to do the thing that the client hired you to make the animation for in the first place (yes, even in an animation awards show). The number of entries I saw that were cool but that had no sense of pacing or drama or storytelling or anything that does that - other than “look at me, I’m cool”– was kind of alarming.
So advice number two is, think harder about the bigger picture – why is the animation there and what is it trying to do?
The third bucket takes an aspect of observation #2 – storytelling - in a different, though I think, vitally important, direction.
Some entries were too damn see-say. They would show you something and then literally tell you exactly what you were seeing. Like “Here’s this amazingly gruesome animation of someone putting their hand in a fire and it roasting to a crisp – and here’s the VO saying ‘if you put your hand in the fire, it will get burned.’” What a terrific waste of time, creativity and the precious attention of your viewer. Look, animation is great at some things but it can’t tell you how hot the flame is, or that the smell of a burning hand is rancid and greasy, somewhere between old leather and bad steak, and that it seems to linger in your mouth for days. Use the VO for that – because not only are you providing the viewer with twice the information in the same amount of time, you’re actually enhancing the impact of the animation. Win-win.
Now it may seem peculiar to you that I am judging a craft – animation – by such things as design, strategy and story. But when we stop ghetto-izing a craft – any craft – when we incorporate its development into the overall process, we wind up with things that are special. In the work that was less successful, there’s a sense that the animators – be they an individual, a department, a partnering studio or agency or something else – were treated as a vendor on an island. “Make me a this and get it to me by Friday and we’ll drop it in here”. And while in one sense I don’t really care how something is made as long as the end result is great, in my experience, collaboration gets you more great, more often. There was a reason that Bernbach put art directors and copywriters together in a room and wound up with world-changing work
Collaboration can lift something that’s perceived as being merely a craft – like animation - out of the valley and place it among the mountaintops. It can make work that’s extraordinary. Exceptional. One might even say, uncanny.