Early storyboard sketches. Because of my work on other promotional videos, I was approached to come up with a concept and take it through production. I worked with our publicity team to develop all of the storyboards and then I selected the imagery, created the animations, edited the video, and even picked the score. And, I only had two weeks to complete the job. Needless to say, there were some really long nights involved.

Two key points that the business owners wanted to stress was that the site was fully responsive / mobile-friendly so I devised a sequence that would show the site changing from desktop to tablet to phone.

Some completed storyboards. The owners wanted to make sure we emphasized readers, authors and discoverability. At the same time, we had to make sure that we displayed featured site functionality as a sort of primer tutorial of the site itself. It was alot to pack in so I decided to focus on the transitional sequences; how one basic idea flows into and lends itself to the next.

I needed to find a visual motif that tied all of these sequences together. I thought alot about entryways and it dawned on me that I needed to be a bit more literal here so I used the idea of a door, or in this case, a shifting rectangle that transitions to what you need it to be but always conveying an entrance. The twinning of the door and the covers didn't occur to me until I started sketching it out. Sometimes you get lucky. The thing in this sequence is that there is all of this early work showing the viewer books and authors and then we need to segue to the idea that this is contained within a single portal. I was proud that I got there in this simple transition.

Another shifting door motif that transitions us from the previous sequence to the idea of being able to find any kind of book you might like. The door let me call out basic ideas within larger fields of text or image.

See the results for yourself. I will warn anyone in advance: The ukulele soundtrack will lodge inside your head.