Some subjects are too dense to film and too important to skip. When Emerald Thinking needed to explain what a data agency actually does, and Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council needed residents to engage with the Local Plan, the answer both times was animation, but not in the way you might expect.
An animated introduction for Emerald Thinking, a London data agency with a lot to explain and no appetite for a dry corporate video. Photography collides with bold illustration in a film with genuine personality, and the client got more than they asked for.
Planning policy made watchable for Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council: an animation that untangles the Local Plan for the residents it affects. Bright, memorable and quick, built to pull people into a consultation most would otherwise scroll past.
Some briefs hand you a story. These two handed me information: what a data agency actually does all day, and what a Local Plan means for the people living inside it. Both matter, neither is easy to film, and both audiences have every excuse to look away. Dense subject matter is exactly where animation earns its keep, so that is where we took both films.
Explainer animation has settled into a house style, and everyone has seen it: clip-art characters, stock templates, the same smooth gestures on every screen. We wanted an individual approach, something with fingerprints on it, and that is exactly what both films deliver. Each one was conceived, scripted, drawn and animated by me personally, start to finish, through Indigo. For Emerald Thinking, that meant colliding photography with bold illustration until a data agency had a personality you could actually see. For Tonbridge and Malling, it meant taking planning policy, the sort of document that runs to hundreds of pages, and finding the handful of images that make residents feel it is about their street, because it is.
Emerald Thinking asked for an introduction and got a calling card they were delighted with. Tonbridge and Malling got something planning consultations rarely have: a film built to be watched, shared and remembered rather than filed and forgotten. Neither subject got any simpler. The telling did, and that is the whole job: when the information is dense, clarity is the deliverable.