Behind The Scenes Of Sprout Social “Why”
Thursday, August 19th, 2010I was approached by the guys at Sprout Social to create an explainer video along the lines of Groupon. Sprout Social is located in Chicago and is pioneering the “SRM” space with its social media platform, allowing businesses to connect to customers in a more meaningful way. Justyn Howard, CEO and co-founder of Sprout Social and Gilbert Lara, designer and partner of Sprout Social both really liked the Groupon videos I had worked on and wanted something similar. And since Sprout Social received a Series A round of funding from Lightbank, the recently launched investment vehicle created by Groupon founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, It made sense to keep things similar but also a little different. If you have been following along with me on Twitter it’s likely you’ve seen a lot of this process and more as the video evolved.
I started out by creating some style frames. I wanted to make sure the characters looked different then Groupon so I created a new set of characters that had clothes, different skin tones and did not use the same textures as Groupon. The characters were created in After Effects using solids and masks. By using solids I was able to adjust the colors across all the frames if needed.
Once the style frames were approved, the next step was to create full storyboards to make sure the story was going to flow and everything being featured was covered.
I then went ahead and created a board-o-matic for pacing purposes. This helped myself and the guys at Sprout Social get an idea of what need to be filled in and flushed out a bit more.
http://www.vimeo.com/14182601From there it was just a matter of getting the animation put together and making sure the message was clear. There were a few rounds of back and forth as new elements for the site needed to be dropped in. The final video turned out great and met the needs of the client. Hope you enjoy it as well.
http://www.vimeo.com/14182681
