LokaVidya: Empowerment Through Sharing
Case Study
A concept or story can be effectively communicated with the help of short videos that delight the target audience thus leaving a positive impression. Motion design is an extremely powerful instrument that can convey ideas meaningfully without taking much of our time (sorry, not sorry TL;DR)!
I worked on the pitch video for LokaVidya while interning at Lokavidya Technologies. I produced the pitch video in its entirety with the help of all the feedback I received from the team during the process.
I was responsible for conceptualization, script writing, story-boarding, illustration, motion design, and post production.
1. Prologue
Overview
LokaVidya is an application that allows users to create educational videos with complementary informational materials. Targeted primarily at base-of-pyramid users in India, it allows them to share and collaborate on these “enriched videos” for achieving a common goal of exchanging knowledge and information across various verticals.
An introductory video was needed to showcase what LokaVidya is about.
Context and usage
The video would be used for pitches and in-person presentations. It would also appear as an introductory video on the website. It needs to be short and to the point.
Goals
To communicate the vision of LokaVidya and introduce the audience to what it does.
Personality and requirements
The tone of the video should be positive. It should delight and pique the interest of the audience. Features showcased should put forward how they help the users.
2. Narrative
Script development
This is the backbone of any sort of content creation. For the script, I was encouraged to go through the LokaVidya website and relevant informational materials created by LokaVidya team during its inception. After consulting the team about all the information the video must convey, I jotted down essential touch points of the video and created the first draft. Sure enough it wasn’t perfect and was too long. After a few pitching sessions, with feedback from the team and a lot of editing, the final version was decided upon.
Initial concepts and thumbnail storyboard
After the script development, I divided the script into a series of sequences. Each sequence corresponds to a particular idea that tells the user about LokaVidya. That is the focus of the entire scene and it’s meaning needs to be thoroughly conveyed.
I researched about how these ideas could materialize as a digestible design form and through sketching, I explored how these focus points could be represented.
Taking a cue from the sketch explorations, I created hand drawn thumbnail storyboards corresponding to each sequence.
And of course, a lot of it had to be discarded.
It was an iterative process and a lot of design elements kept changing and evolving. I defined possible motion design directions for the same. These frame by frame sequences denote how the animation might move forward.
Style frames and Illustration
In this process I got to test out the presentation of conceptual ideas as a part of a tangible design narrative. This gave me an idea of what would or wouldn’t work along with the given context and whether continuity of the sequences could be achieved from the same.
I was encouraged to emphasize the verticals LokaVidya provided services in. Hence I experimented with coloured backgrounds in the corresponding sequences. It also provided a break from the monotony of the white background used throughout.
LokaVidya app is in a very early stage and is constantly evolving. The user interface elements had not been finalized therefore features couldn’t be shown in action. The biggest challenge I faced was keeping all the designs conceptual. How do I show that the app and its videos have low memory footprint without going into details? How do I bring out the essence of a feature without making it too direct?
I illustrated possible solutions and explored how motion could enhance the way an idea gets conveyed meaningfully in the sequences.
Motion Design
I used motion to convey meaning and to let the audience easily understand different themes and features.
In this sequence for example, I wanted to show that LokaVidya encompasses certain features that allows users to document and share educational content. So I made the elements that symbolize the feature merge and morph into the LokaVidya icon as if to denote that they are a part of what makes LokaVidya.
The following sequence denotes LokaVidya’s accessibility. There are versions available for mobile, tablets and desktop.
The content on LokaVidya has low memory footprint, the data is compressed while retaining it’s quality. This is represented by a relative compression animation. I tried conveying a sense of comparison between what the content was and what it becomes internally, even though it appears to have undergone no change at all.
All content on LokaVidya are in the form of modules. These modules can have anything ranging from educational photos, videos to quizzes that aid learning, etc. This is to show that one can manage their content, put different modules together, edit and add new modules very easily on LokaVidya. I tried to symbolically represent it by showing that the actions are just as easy as changing values by moving a slider.
Editing
After all the sequences were done and put together, I went on to hunt for free background music and music effects that were available on YouTube audio library (yay!). I settled for a very common background music and edited in few music effects with the voice over.
3. Epilogue
Retrospective
This was the first time I worked on anything which involved me doing everything from script writing to illustrating, animating and producing. I learnt a lot of things in the process and I believe I have definitely grown as a designer and as a person because of this experience.
Looking back, I am quite happy with the result but a few things I’d like to improve if given the chance would be the voice over and the speed of animation flow in certain areas. The voice over, recorded on my phone, has a lot of glitches. The audio could be properly edited or recorded anew.
In certain places the animation seems too fast which may be distracting at times. Further explorations could be done to improve the user experience of the video.
Key takeaways
- Always create an animatic with voice over as a proof of concept. The editing process did not go very smoothly because I hadn’t created any animatic for reference during the motion design process which led to few improvisations.
- Don’t get too attached to particular ideas or designs. It’s important to let go of ideas and embrace change because design is bound to evolve.
Thank you for reading! ✨
Think I could’ve improved this a certain way? Have some ideas you wanna share? Think I could help you with something? Shoot me an email! 🙌
