We worked with Drawnmedia to create 999 hand-drawn frames.

Our brief was to write and produce a 90 second animation promoting Capgemini’s Infrastructure Services (cloud computing, virtualised servers and other technological wizardry used to help keep the earth spinning on its digital axis).

The video is currently available in English but will be translated into a number of languages over the coming weeks (http://capgemini.com/infra).

For this animation we introduced paper to help the narrative as well as a second camera for a couple of shots.

We used over 100 hole-punched dots, 34 circle sectors to animate the piechart, 20 strips of rolled paper, 17 origami boats and 12 paper people.

This was produced in collaboration with Drawnmedia, who we did back-to-back stop-motion animations with through September – who needs natural light?

You can also view this video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/k02iNcLvNAM

This time we were animating the story of the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. This is a charity which pairs female entrepreneurs in developing countries with business mentors around the world to help kickstart their business aspirations.

This animation was premiered at a launch event for the charity in New York earlier this month, but we’ve just been too busy to get this post online – till now.

You can also see the animation on YouTube here http://youtu.be/2tAuzbotHQ8

Part of the workshop included a series of field trips to some of Barcelona’s many architectual treasures. This, combined with the other three days worth of footage added to our long list of video assets. In the end we had around four hours of footage; so with headphones on and coffee close at hand, we set about whittling the material down to the final four minute video.

A few short months later we were flying to Switzerland to film another of Matter Solutions’ clients – Zurich Financial Services.

The brief was to create a 4 minute video which captured the key outcomes for communication to the rest of organisation.

Due to the size of the venue we thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try out the Canon 5D as a secondary camera to ensure we got nice shots in a relatively tight, busy environment, and it performed really well.

“I asked Picturesmith to produce a short video capturing an important two-day event with our senior executives. They fully understood our needs and were autonomous, efficient and discreet while filming. They delivered the final edit within a week, at a very competitive price.”

Richard Lorenzi, SThree PLC

Video posted with kind permission.

The scene we tested used origami objects, which combined with a camera track and tilt revealed the word ‘Solutions’.

It was the first time we’ve used Luxology’s 3D application – modo – and it proved quick, and relatively straightforward.

The final animation used a ribbon to ‘connect’ the different scenes, as a metaphor for the functionality and benefits of the tool.

After agreeing the initial treatment, we set to work creating the assets before bringing them into Motion to be animated. The project was finished in Final Cut Pro and Soundtrack Pro was used for sound design.

Hopefully they’ll go live on the client’s site soon, when they do we’ll add a link to the final videos.

We were in production within a couple of days of submitting the storyboard, and emerged a several days and close to a thousand hand-drawn frames later with the finished animation.

Happily the client had no edits, which is a good job because stop-motion is not easy to edit.

We’re really pleased with the final outcome.

“I couldn’t recommend Picturesmith highly enough. The effort they took to understand our business to be both content as well as process savvy was invaluable. The results speak for themselves. The whole experience was both rewarding and fun!”

David Christie, Innovationarts