Posts Tagged ‘animation’

Buzzworthy Wednesday: Liberty Mutual “Good Vibrations”

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Liberty Mutual has been using the “good karma” branding message for a number of years now. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is a recently created animated addition to their Responsibility Project. It’s not often that you see a company take the marketing strategy to create change and to be authentic about it. I think this message was successful in grabbing the viewer to show the impact a simple action can have in the lives of others but comes across seeming disingenuous in others.

The animation is very well done and their pay it forward puts an emotional touch on their brand to communicate meaningfully with consumers.

Where I think it fails in some ways is in the use of the office building…let’s be honest most large office buildings are occupied by large corporations, financial and insurance companies and Liberty Mutual is no exception. Is this a reach? A sort of pessimism on my viewing part? I don’t know. It may be I’m seeing some symbolism that Liberty Mutual hadn’t considered when working on the project. It’s also a little long at a little over 4 minutes so part of the reason it may have gotten so few views is the fact that many online viewers have a shorter attention span than this video requires to unfold.

Either way, it’s definitely very well crafted by French animator Jérémy Clapin, the director of Skhizein. Clapin’s visual voice is incredibly strong and make this brilliant piece a pleasure to watch regardless of whether or not I am reading into the crowd in the office building symbolism too much. I guess if you remove Liberty Mutual and its marketing message from the equation I find it much more enjoyable and captivating short to watch. What about you? Am I crazy here?

Buzzworthy Wednesday: 8-bit trip

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Everyone who knows me, knows I’m a big fan of stop motion animation. This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is a video tribute to some classic 80′s video games including Tetris, Mario, PacMan and they’re all made of LEGOs using stop motion animation. The music in the video is by Daniel Larsson and the animation was done by Tomas Redigh, the two members of Rumdreglage, who spend 1,500 hours in creating this amazing video.

Tomas Redigh spent over 7 months creating this video in his studio moving LEGO bricks around and taking pictures. In it’s first 5 days online it racked up over 1.7 million views and a month later is over 3.5 million views.

While its hard to say what exactly caused this music video to be such a huge success I think part is due to the pain-staking process of stop motion video and even the casual viewer can appreciate the effort that goes in. I also think the use of LEGOs was brilliant not only to visualize that 8-bit video look but also because  of the huge online community of passionate fans that LEGOs has. I hope LEGO as a corporation gives these guys and other independent stop motion artists an opportunity to work with them and produce animations for future LEGO online video marketing projects…if the guys from Rymdreglage are interested.