SHILLINGTON MANIFESTO

Shillington Education, a graphic design school, approached us with a wide open brief to develop a manifesto film to inspire prospective students. They wanted a completely different look and feel to their existing films. We were basically told that we had complete freedom to pitch them on a new look. Designing for a design school is nothing to be taken lightly, so we were honored and also really excited!

This is a pretty special project for us, since it was the first one we did as CARTEL. With the open creative brief and being involved from start to finish it was a fantastic project for us to develop as a studio.
We did everything on this one: developing the script, storyboarding and creative direction, design, animation, project management and sound design.

Totally our kind of project!

The styleframes for our pitch were a little different to the final approved look. Shillington felt we should tone down those backgrounds and use the gradients a little more strategically. Good call — we definitely went a little too hard on that initially! We love working closely with clients and making sure we understand what they want, so these open and clear review rounds are super helpful.

We also knew from the initial brief that there would be a portrait version of the main film for social media. So we kept our design modular, meaning we could move the compositions around fairly quickly. Because there were also 15” and 30” cutdowns, every bit of optimisation on the design was important to make sure we hit the deadline without any drama.

Here you can get a little look behind the scenes of how we animated a couple of these shots. We animated 90% of this in After Effects, using 2D objects. For the rest of the objects we went into Cinema 4D whenever we needed a bit more flexibility — sometimes its just easier to do some real 3D instead of faking it! We were really happy with how well the 2D and 3D objects came together in the final comp.