The Co-Creation Process: Mathematica Case Study

Image of a laptop with a screen displayed reading "Becoming a more customer-centric organization was a major goal at Mathematica, a global firm specializing in evidence generation, analysis and application."

THE NEED: XPLANE wanted to move away from exclusively text and image based case studies toward more compelling video case studies while highlighting a specific project to show prospective clients the XPLANE process from start to finish.

THE SOLUTION: Interview client sponsor from Mathematica to discuss their experience working with XPLANE in order to co-create their action plan to improve customer-centricity, and accurately represent that experience with an engaging video case study.

MY ROLE

  • Motion design

  • Illustration

  • Storyboard

  • Video editing

TEAM

  • Marketing manager

  • Creative director

  • Client sponsor

TOOLS USED

  • Adobe After Effects

  • Adobe Illustrator

  • Procreate

  • Google Docs

THE PROCESS: From client interview, to script writing — the initial steps were handled by my marketing manager. When the project reached me, the script was ready for an accompanying storyboard to flesh out the general flow of the video. At this point I:

  • Listened to the script and reviewed the library of assets that had been created for the initial project with Mathematica

  • Decided what illustration assets created in the initial project best represented Mathematica’s experience with XPLANE

  • Culled through XPLANE’s assets to see what could fit into this video to represent XPLANE’s expertise

  • Created several specific illustrations that aligned with both Mathematica’s client experience and XPLANE’s expertise

After mocking up each panel from the combined assets, I aligned the panels to the provided script. I then did some visual research of motion graphic pieces to get an idea of how I might want the assets to move and interact with each other. I wanted to know what was possible, and evaluate what felt manageable within the timeline and budget we were working with. From there, I arrived at this general flow. At this stage, I simply provided notes explaining what the general movement of the video would be to share with my team:

GIF of many storyboard images

After plenty of discussion, feedback, ideas, and general reviews between myself, my creative director, and marketing manager this was ready to move into After Effects.

Screenshot of workflow in Adobe After Effects

Leading up to this project, I had experience doing some light video work (mostly creating short GIFs for social media, and a short music video for “American Sports” by Arctic Monkeys) but had never created something quite as involved as this was going to be. After quite a few YouTube tutorials and some consulting with my more seasoned XPLANE cohort, I dove into this project.

Along the way some initially desired animations were abandoned due to time and budget constraints. From initial storyboard to final video I employed simple yet eye-catching motion graphics pulled from the robust asset libraries of both organizations while leveraging the voice of our customer to effectively share the experience of an XPLANE client.

FINAL SOLUTION: