Annual review animation

Creative ways to communicate with employees – Following a historic year of achievements, we helped AstraZeneca celebrate their success with a 12-minute annual review animation which, despite its length, engaged employees worldwide thanks to a polished and dynamic style.

Background

Following an extremely successful year for AstraZeneca, driven by their commitment to the three pillars underpinning everything they do – Achieve scientific leadership, Return to growth and Be a great place to work – our client wanted to communicate their achievements in medicine development in a way that felt open and inclusive to all employees across the globe, and that would transmit a sense of true recognition, gratitude and celebration.

Challenge

A real departure from previous years, when less sophisticated presentation methods were used, this time our client needed a truly memorable way to communicate the range of successes and milestones achieved, and that would transmit the impact and importance of such a historic year for AstraZeneca.

With only a long list of achievements to work from, and constantly evolving data to come from different sources throughout the project, we needed to think of a way to scope, manage and produce the animation in a way that would allow both AstraZeneca and Parker teams to be as flexible as possible, whilst not compromising on quality and ultimate goal of the annual review animation.

Solution

A true collaboration with our client, we first developed a set of visual ideas conceived to inject energy and maintain momentum throughout what resulted in – due to the sheer amount of achievements covered – a longer-than-usual annual review animation, 12 minutes in total*.

To set the tone and intent straight away and spread it across our client’s global audience, the opening is inspired by the sense of celebration, hard work and creativity – even the glamour – of a film industry award ceremony.

Thinking of new ways to relay information, a dynamic animation style, energising music tracks, and a variety of visual styles help to structure content, and to not only keep audiences energised throughout the whole 12 minutes, but also encourage true engagement by creating a buzz in the room.

After creating a rough storyboard for narrative, and a key style frame from each scene for visual concepts, everything was modelled in Cinema 4D. We then textured, lit and rendered the animation in SolidAngle’s Arnold render engine.

The use of 3D space throughout the annual review animation hints at the scale of what the different global teams have achieved, and makes them feel at reach, encouraging ownership.

A 3D scan of Mount Fuji from NASA inside a lightbulb provides a playful and memorable way of highlighting achievements from that region.

Carefully thought-out colour, light and texture treatments elevate basic – but essential – concepts such as seamless progress and teamwork.

A shatter effect adds a strong sense of energy to the annual review animation.

A constant fluid motion effect applied to 75,000 particles hints at the concepts of evolution, flexibility and teamwork that have made the large number of achievements a reality.

The animation proved to be another key employee engagement tool in our client’s programme, receiving great feedback from everyone involved:

“Thanks team for doing a great job – and for your patience and creativity in helping us get this right.” – Global Medicines Development Communications Director, AstraZeneca

“Wow, this looks fantastic! You have done a great job in keeping the energy and interest up all through the 12 minutes. Thank you all for great partnership on this project – we are really pleased with the result. It is tricky to work on a product where the content develops as we go along, but you knew this from the start and have been amazing in picking up and adjusting the annual review animation through the process. – Global Medicines Development and Gothenburg Site Communications, AstraZeneca

(*) – We have included an edited version of the 12-minute animation for illustrative purposes.