A 30 second animated spot for Content Workshop that showcases their prowess in cybersecurity marketing and entices new clients to come onboard.

"It was the best-performing asset in our entire campaign, driving more traffic than our paid search and remarketing campaigns combined."

-David J Ebner 🥸, President of Content Workshop

Pitching Visual Concepts

After the initial discovery call, I had a good idea of what David wanted for the cybersecurity showcase video. I worked up 3 visual concepts to pick from: one capturing and pushing the existing brand, one focusing on abstract graphics, and one in line with industry-standard tech graphics.

In the next call, we locked in on a direction halfway between the Brand+ concept and the Texture Tapestry concept. The aim would be to infuse brand elements with the other-worldliness of abstract graphics, all wrapped in an astronomy theme.

Storyboards

Production

Animatic

A very early version of the animation for nailing down the timing of the entire piece. There’s generally very little to no animation in an animatic, just placing the storyboards over a scratch voiceover track to see how long everything should be on screen.

This gives the team a good idea of how and when each moment hits.

Behind the scenes

A time-lapse look at animating one of the scenes.

After Effects: “Expressioneering”

I developed two rigs for the project: a dot/line network and a reusable star field.

The dot/line network draws lines between dots based on proximity and includes controls for dot size/randomness, tapered strokes, stroke width and positioning. It’s heavily based on code from aescripts 13 Days of Expressions YT playlist (a fantastic resource).

The star field ended up being used 35+ times in the project. I added master properties to control XYZ spread, star size and random placement options to be able to get different looks quickly.

Version 1

A peek at a very early version of the spot. You can see how similar & different it is from the final version. It can be fairly standard for things to be rough in the first version. Then through discussion, collaboration and effort, we arrive at a polished final.

Reflection

This project was a fun opportunity for me to stretch my legs in 2D & 2.5D—something I hadn’t done in a while at the time of this project. I love handling projects from start to finish, through all stages, and collaborating closely with clients. David, JB and the crew at Content Workshop are always a dream to work with.