“Diversity and inclusion is at the heart of our brand promise— and always has been.”

Project Background

One of Coca-Cola’s many dedicated diversity and inclusion initiatives needed a short explainer video to promote and boost their supplier diversity efforts. As a woman and an LGBT business owner myself, it was an exciting project to be pulled in on, and one of my first motion design pieces for Coke Studios. The graphic style had already been established in a previous project for Coca-Cola Connect by REMADE. So the challenge became how to deliver the message and embody the style from another amazing agency on my own— in a two-week timeline from receiving the script to final deliverable.

Design Process

The video wouldn’t be a very good representation of diversity and inclusion if it didn’t showcase a big cast of unique characters. Rather than designing and rigging 8 whole characters with arms and legs, I streamlined the design by sticking with just heads, which could then be treated more like icons. This decision saved a ton of time and provided simple design solutions along the way.

With the characters designed, I started moving down the script and creating all the assets scene-by-scene.

Animation Process

Overlord wasn’t yet part of my workflow arsenal, so prepping assets and importing them into AE was a tedious and time consuming task. Everything ended up either as a shape layer or text layer and was animated as such. Joysticks n Sliders would have also been a perfect candidate for this piece, but other than one instance of CC Particle World, no plugins were involved.

I’ve grown a lot since creating this project and would do many things differently now, but the client was happy and I think the resulting video was worth the tedium.

Credits

Design + Animation: Shea Lord
Software: Adobe Illustrator, After Effects
VO: Zaraya Skea
Music: Warner Chappel
Timeline: 2 weeks