W e were employed to create an animated promotional video for Engineers Without Borders UK. EWB UK is part of a global movement engineering a better future. They inspire, enable and influence the engineering community to serve all people and the planet better than ever before.
The brief we were given asked for a 2-minute video to explain who EWB are and what their goals are moving forward towards 2030 (by 2030, EWB UK aim to build a movement of over half a million people, powerful enough to radically transform the culture of engineering).
We were going to primarily look at working with primitive shapes that we could create, form, reshape and use as building blocks along with typography to emphasise key points. We also wanted to use the line that circles the globe and forms the lightbulb in the EWB logo, following it from scene to scene. Throughout the video (particularly the first segment) we wanted to play with the idea of an invisible engineer using bounding boxes to build shapes. These shapes would balance and fall, they could intersect and morph into other shapes and be used to house various other graphics such as growing plants and water.
We also came up with the Earth rolling like a marble through scenes on a journey to a ‘safe and just’ state but the client didn’t think that an abstract approach or a ‘rolling journey’ would work well so we ended up going with a more traditional explainer video style as seen in the video at the top of the post.
The finished animation will be used during community events, university lectures, and presentations to partners and funders to give insight into EWB UK and their strategy.
The voice-over was provided by Nicky Griffiths
