Motion graphic video for the school governors initiative

Back in January, I started work on a video project for The University of Manchester. The brief was to celebrate and publicise their 'school governors initiative', a programme where university staff help schools and colleges to improve, and in turn, provide an opportunity for self-development for those that volunteer.

Their initiative has won a handful of awards and I was keen to create a video that would do justice to the hard work and accolades won by Alison, Stephanie and the social responsibility team at the university.

This projects covers;

• Storyboarding
• Digital and hand-drawn Illustration
• Info graphics
• Motion graphics
• Video editing
• Voice over

The Process

Working closely with the team, we started with the script.  Concept visuals were sketched out and then both were combined into a slideshow to give a rough idea of the story they wanted to tell, and how the visuals and voice-over would work together.

There was a lot of information to get across in the script including surveys and stats, so I considered it important that the illustrations carried a narrative. Two of the key scenes identified from the script were the establishing shot of the university itself and the big success of 'over 1000 governors'.

Naturally, the script went through revisions, and what started as a three-minute video eventually expanded to around eight minutes to get the entire story told. It was a tough call to leave anything out,  so we decided to go ahead with the longer edit and treat it as a short film.

For the voiceover, I did the initial pass using a Snowball Blue microphone, which is perfect for voice work. Then dipped into the talent pool of my performer friends at Comedysportz, who individually have done voice work for talking books and video games and offered a handful of voices to choose from. After choosing Rob Hudson, a recording session took place, which was edited and synced up to the video.

The entire project took three months of working across many different disciplines. Here's the final result;

Technical info

• Illustrations were sketched both by hand and digitally then inked and coloured in ClipStudio.
• Finished elements were imported into flash where other motion graphics were created.
• The voiceover was recorded on a Snowball blue mic and edited in Audacity.
• The video sections were edited together in Premiere.