Behind The Scenes — How We Made Our In-House Animated Brand Video

Last month we were excited to release our most experimental and creative brand video yet.

“Your Video Workflow Reimagined” was an exploration into a colorful, seamless visualisation of how we tell Wipster’s story; an old-school, disconnected video workflow transforming into one that brings your team together and effortlessly moves projects forward.

Our in-house video producer Linus Nelson was tasked with creating this reimagined world. Working alongside Rollo Wenlock (Wipster CEO and Co-Founder) to find the brief, he then aligned it with our story and created a fun, bright, dynamic machine-inspired animation that our audience would not only appreciate, but also walk away with a new understanding of how Wipster transforms their video workflow.

We spoke briefly with Linus, who has since moved on from Wipster to motion design studio Fox&Co (and is very much missed by the Wipster crew!) and chatted about the behind-the-scenes process of getting Your Video Workflow Reimagined across the line.

How did you storyboard and plan the animation? What was that process like?

The process for this was interesting because all the machines had to have a function and make sense as a visualisation of the Wipster workflow, while also looking cool. The functionality of the machines and the layout of the structures kind of informed the storyboard in a weird way and if I thought of all those things at once my head would probably explode. Luckily, I had plenty of time for R&D and Rollo was really helpful to bounce ideas off and to break confusing tasks down. I scrapped a huge amount of renderings and concepts and the whole process was probably like 90% R&D and 10% production.

You’ve typically worked in 2D motion design. How was working in 3D? What software did you use?

The process of turning a few scribbles on paper into a finished 3D asset is a bit of a grind but also really satisfying. I hadn’t used Cinema 4D in 4 years so I was basically relearning it on the fly. However, I think it’s by far the easiest 3D package to pick up.

What work were you inspired by when creating the Reimagined world?

Much of my research and inspiration was from Googling and finding images of ‘engines’ / factories’ / ‘mechanical stuff’ and scrolling and scrolling until I found something that looked intriguing. I also looked at lots of intricate and loopy looking renderings and illustrations — Man Vs Machine made amazing Nike ads that looked like crazy Rube Goldberg machines, and I kept going back to them.

There was a lot chatter around the office when it came to finding enough power to render the final project. How did you manage to get around that?

We had to outsource to a render farm as my home computer and MacBook just wouldn’t have the power to get it done. Using the render farm was pretty straightforward for the most part until I got to some of the more intricate shots. The biggest snag I hit in the whole production process was having to learn a new render engine because one shot in particular was going to cost $12NZD per frame in Physical (the built in C4D renderer) which would have been well over $3000NZD for the whole 1 minute film.

What do you think about it now that it's all out into the world?

All of the tweaks and fixes I should have made! 😉

What are you doing these days? What's a recent project you've worked on and can talk about?

There’s a couple of projects I really want to talk about but can’t just yet. Currently I'm trying to get more into illustration and character animation and at some point I want to get into creating my own films too.

Watch the completed Your Video Workflow Reimagined video