Ann Arbor | AOR- MMGY
Creative Director: Zach Takenaga
Senior Copy Writer: Kyle Duda
Art Director: Dani Maslan
2021 – 2023
With our “Challenge Everything. Create Anything” campaign, we leveraged paper craft animations to promote travel to Ann Arbor for anything from leisure activities and restaurant week to meeting venues. Not only was this a huge hit, it was also a fantastic solution to not having a photoshoot budget. Animations ran on social, digital out of home boards and display banners.
With the exception of the two most recent animations (retail and bike trail) all animations were created in house including the design, paper cutting, assembly, stop motion animation photography and post production.
Both Retail and Bike Trail animations were digitally drawn in house to create the effect of paper craft and were then animated by the production house 19Below.
SITUATION
Our campaign name “Challenge Everything. Create Anything.” not only represented what we love about Ann Arbor, but it represented how we approached our work. We were challenged to come up with a creative way to sell Ann Arbor that did not involve photography, or very little of it.
SOLUTION
We pitched creating craft-paper stop-motion animation and our client LOVED it.
PROCESS
We picked up a Cricut and some craft paper from Target, downloaded the software and started drawing up our scenes in Adobe Illustrator. After some trial and error we learned how to use the Cricut, cut out all our pieces and began assembling them for production. Once assembled we set up a camera in our in-house photo studio and frame by frame shot our animations. Afterwards we color corrected and retouched our shots before looping together in After Effects for a complete video animation.
RESULTS
Could not be happier with the results. Our paper-craft stop-motion animation experiment was a huge success and out-performed all of our photography based advertisements. The client was thrilled, increased our budget and extended the “paper-craft” campaign for 2 years.
LEARNINGS
Not having prior experience in paper-craft artwork nor shooting stop-motion animation meant there was a bit of a learning curve involved in these executions. As fun as it was, paper-craft, stop-motion animation was incredibly time consuming to get the results we wanted for our client and eventually decided to take our work digital. We were able to replicate the craft-paper look using overlays, textures and effects in Adobe and outsourced our animations to the production company 19Below. After handing off our illustrations, we directed 19Below on our animation direction with the intention of creating digital animations to resemble stop-motion. While the animations were missing some of the quality that you can only get by shooting actual stop-motion photography of tangible cut paper-craft, we found that what we gained from going digital (the added detail and efficiency) made up for it and then some.
