at MAKE Digital
Took an insanely complex set of services and boiled them down to digestible—yet still meaningful and accurate—pieces of content.
Created three animated videos and directed four testimonial videos.
Oversaw the design of a new website in 2017 as the project's art director.
While I directed the design of their website once upon a time, and have created a variety of assets for them since, the meat of my work for Benefit Trust has been in the video arena.
Benefit Trust is an impressive Kansas City company with an impressive track record, impressive people, and impressive capabilities—none of which I can adequately explain. But the folks at BT can, and I worked hand-in-hand with them to use the tools at my disposal to create a versatile repository of motion graphics and testimonial-style videos for them to deploy to partners and potential customers as they see fit.
For the live-action stuff, I wrote the script—leveraging the experts at Benefit Trust for the technical nitty gritty—and directed the talent on the day of the shoot. Then I handled the animated graphics for the intros, outros, and lower thirds in post-production, as well as music selection and sound editing.
For the pure motion graphics projects, those were all me: from conceptualization and storyboarding, to the animation—in After Effects and Cinema 4D—and final compositing.
nBalance is BT's proprietary awesome sauce. It's also super complicated. I used playful 2D graphics and a warm palette to decrease stress while learning about this wildly powerful platform.
While the visuals for this one are quite a bit different than the look & feel of the nBalance video, I leveraged the same voice actor and style of music to establish some consistency throughout. While the nBalance video used flat 2D graphics to simplify a complex platform, the goal this time was to exemplify the robust power of the overall ecosystem to give investors a sense of its immense capabilities.
We shot a four-part series of explainer videos, using the services of the wonderfully talented videographer Tim Zook to pull back the veil on some of the smart-as-hell people behind the platform at Benefit Trust. I wrote the scripts and directed the on-camera folks as they learned in real-time how freaking hard it can be to "look natural" while reading from an iPad teleprompter.
Leveraging the aesthetic of the Custom Portfolios video, I once again leveraged After Effects and Cinema 4D, and their beautiful marriage, to create a visually engaging welcome mat to potential new customers across the country. My only requirement back to the client at the outset of this project? That I got to make the front character resemble Benefit Trust's president, right down to his glorious beard.
Benefit Trust's website was designed to be intentionally "gentle" in its approach to laying out traditionally masculine services and materials, to stand out among its old-fashioned peers.
