Evidence of Insurability

Situation

When I was based in Charleston, SC, I ook on a few freelance projects with a local company, PlanSource. Their creative director had recently left and their marketing team needed some help shipping a few videos. This project was an animated explainer video talking about Evidence of Insurability, an important piece of the life insurance underwriting process. They had a script, but needed help turning it into an animated explainer video. The turn-around needed to be quick and there was very little direction given, other than they wanted the video to be animated. I had no style frames to start from and was given zero reference images to start. My design friends will know these can be always some of the most challenging projects when you are handing no direction and told to “go be creative.” I was hesitant, but nevertheless, with a weekend to spare and to prove I could do this, away I went to go be creative.

Approach

Once the voice over was sent over, I got to work on the storyboard to get the concept approved. I didn’t have much time or source material to work with, so it was a bit of a challenge coming up with material that would support the script. Having sold life insurance before, I knew the product wasn’t exactly the most cheerful topic to feature so I tried to keep the illustrations simple and abstract. The characters were more abstract shapes than actual human figures. When discussing the barriers to the process discussed in the video, so as to not insult hardworking underwriting and HR teams, we used metaphors to represent the frustrations people feel when completing the manual process PlanSource has automated. Once I had a solid storyboard approved, it was on to animation.

Outcome

I went from storyboard to final animation over a weekend and the client loved it, as did the PlanSource marketing team. I learned for future projects with short turnaround times like this to charge a little more so I can hire an illustrator!

Here’s the intro part where a bulk of the animation was done. The rest of the video was mostly screen capture and kinetic type demonstrating the solution.

Responsibilities

Project Management, Storyboarding, Graphic Design, Animation

Technology Used

Adobe Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro