Tag Archives: animation

Buzzworthy Wednesday: Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One

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This week’s Buzzworthy Wednesday is an animated video created by HubSpot for the “Adventures of Captain Inbound: Episode One“.

Full Disclosure: I may be a bit biased here since I was the writer and animator on this project. While I tend to be hyper-critical of my work (is any creative person not?) I am more impressed with the strategy behind the branding video carried out by HubSpot.

They didn’t just create the video and throw  it out to the whims of the internet, they had a plan. In the word’s of the Episode “Guru” of David Meerman Scott “Create exceptional content that people will want to share, and point the world to your virtual doorstep.”

So the video was posted on their blog, they built a custom landing page for the series to reside (oh yes…there will be more), started a fan page on Facebook and launched a Twitter account for Captain Inbound. Practicing what they are preaching. The video was also mentioned as a great example of how “Content Rules” on the  MarketingProfs blog today by Ann Handley. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

Video Marketing Telesummit – Listen for FREE

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Originally published on the Adelie Studios Blog >>

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maruxa Murphy for the Video Marketing Telesummit. It was a lot of fun talking about the usage of animation for online marketing applications and having a great discussion on the topic.

There are 11 other interviews done with some outstanding video peeps representing different specialties of online video marketing. The others interviewed for this series include: Michael Koenigs of Traffic Geyser, Perry Lawrence of AskMrVideo.com, Andrew Lock creator of the podcast “Help My Business Sucks!”, Josh Anderson of Internet Business Ideas Inc, webinar expert Stephen Beck, David Frey of Marketing Best Practices, video newsletter expert Michael Yost, Will Franco of jiveSYSTEMS, Joshua Aikens of Flixify, Michelle Cox of Metacafe (who I’d also interviewed a couple years ago) and video blogging extraordinaire and all around great guy from the Boston social media scene Steve Garfield.

If you are interested in checking out the series it runs from 6/14 – 6/18 (my session happens to be on Friday 6/18 from 1-4pm EST). Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

Here’s the description of my session for the event.

Eric Guerin

“How To Grab Your Customers By The Eyeballs And Keep Them Glued To The Screen Through Fun And Effective Animated Videos For Your Business”

Eric Guerin has over 15 years experience in the visual communications field working for marketing firms in and around Boston MA. Eric started his own company, Adelie Studios, in 1999 with the mission of providing an integrated solution to customer’s print and web design needs.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this presentation…

  • Discover the 2 types of video animation that is often overlooked in video marketing today
  • The easiest and most unique way to position your products in your video marketing strategy
  • The #1 way you can grab your audience’s attention in the first 5 seconds of your video
  • Why 53% of your current viewers are NOT watching your entire video (and how you can immediately change these stats to your favor!)
  • 3 superstar tips to getting your videos viewed by your intended audience again and again
  • How to create high-converting videos without your talking head in the video
  • The single most powerful way to get more views to your videos
  • How Google Site Maps can get your videos dominating Google searches within hours
  • 3 major reasons your audience will want to pass on your animated video
  • The fastest way to get your audience to see your animated videos through your email marketing campaigns

Register to listen to the entire series or just one session for FREE.

Adelie Studios 2.0 – the relaunch

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So as promised the first step to relaunching Adelie Studios was the new logo design, thanks to all those who helped with the design process.

Now I have completely overhauled the website making it more user friendly, focused on online video animation and generally cooler in all ways. I give you the 62% more awesome…Adelie Studios Website.

It still needs work – I’ll be writing and adding an e-book about online video marketing, adding new blog posts and specific online video landing pages but for now…I rest.

Thanks to all who have been supportive during this process and if you know someone who wants to find a more entertaining way to market their business online…well you know who to call. Thank you.

Rebranding Adelie Studios – The Reveal

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The people have spoken! Many through Facebook or Twitter, some by email and a handful on the blog in the comments. Crowd sourcing the design was definitely a great idea and I got a lot of ideas and feedback that I wouldn’t have gone to on my own.

#6 was the overwhelming favorite however a number of people liked elements from #7, particularly the ink blot rather than the traditional circle for the play button because of how that ink blot related to the style relative to the animated work I do. I felt it also gave it less of a “corporate” design studio look and what I do is definitely not traditional messaging as I tend to make branding more interesting and entertaining. So there had to be a fun element to the design too. So… a la peanut butter and jelly sandwiches…I combined the two elements into one logo.

I also decided to play around with the colors a bit, I felt like the dark burgundy (or PMS #1815 to those geeky designers out there) was too strong and would function better on the website in small quantities used to stress links, thin rules and such. So after playing around for a bit I came up with the following.

I bring you the new and improved logo for Adelie Studios.

Adelie Studios...better, faster, stronger

Adelie Studios...better, faster, stronger

I truly appreciate all the feedback I got which made the rebranding far more fun getting other peoples perspectives, constructive criticism and input. Special thanks goes out to Mark Cahill, David Saraiva, Jenn O’Meara, Mark Shunney, Mike Langford, Lisa Middleton Griffin, Melissa Fetterhoff, Tammy Miner Stott, Ian MacLean Davis, Paul Scannell, Jeff Brouillet, Matt “Klawful” Smith and of course to Leah Guerin, my wife who put up with my incessant “What do you think of this?”, “What about these colors?”, “What does this make you think of?”, “What if I move this over here?”, “Is there any coffee left downstairs?”…you get the picture.

Thanks to all of you and be on the lookout for the website relaunch in the next couple of weeks!

Rebranding Adelie Studios

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It was has been almost 10 years ago since Adelie Studios was started as predominantly a graphic and web design company and a lot has changed since then. Now I am doing mostly online marketing animation and animated tutorial videos…not so much graphic or web design. So because of this shift in my design focus and the fact that it’s been neglected for so long…it’s time for Adelie Studios to have a make over.

Originally Adelie Studios was named after my dog but I decided to play around with the branding a bit and look at other elements like the penguin (which I got the name for the dog from) and the meaning of Adelie which is “noble” in both French and German.

So now is where I am looking for your help. I am so used to taking other people’s concepts and running with a creative message that it becomes difficult for me to be objective with my own stuff when I am the only voice. So I’d like to crowd source some feedback from my creative friends and connections.

I have posted a few of my most recent logo design concepts here. Please vote for which one you like below in the comments, on Facebook or you can tweet me your favorite on Twitter. I look forward to all of your feedback!

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Buzzworthy Wednesday: Liberty Mutual "Good Vibrations"

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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

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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.