Handmade Content Suite

The beauty of any piece of content, particularly video and animation, is that it can be used to generate multiple outputs to meet project goals. Amazon Handmade heard about the work we had done with the SMX team in creating a set of high-quality, unified explainers and reached out about doing one themselves. In chatting with them further, we found that they needed a lot more than just one explainer but didn’t know how to get it: display ads, website content, and support for French-speaking customers. So we came up with a plan to efficiently leverage new and existing content to create over 50 unique pieces of content from those original projects.

Original explainer

We knew we had to start off with the first and largest part of the project to define the visual style, brand voice, and set the trajectory for the whole project. From there we could create the additional assets they needed. We all believed an animated explainer would be perfect to explain their program and inspire selling partners that fit the bill to start listing their products on Amazon Handmade. So we got to work.

Visual style & tone

We began the process of style ideation and concepting. After a few ideas, we all got excited about one in particular. Given that selling partners who sell on Amazon Handmade actually hand make their products, we wanted the visual style to look, in many ways, made by hand.

We knew that the video would have to match the parent-wide Amazon style guide, but we adapted slightly to a felt board visual style that was tactile, colorful, and emphasized texture. We wanted it to look fun and artsy, but still very relatable and welcoming. Unique, but not “different.”

After we wrote the script and it was approved by the Handmade team, we started on the animatic. The animatic is a roughly animated storyboard to help everyone involved (the client, stakeholders, even PR and legal departments) see the visuals and the story flow well before animation begins. This is the time when it’s easiest to change or adjust the script, the voice over, the visuals, and the animation timing. Ensuring the animatic is dialed in prevents scope creep and timeline delays—the animatic is a pivotal stage.

Illustration & animation

Once the animatic was approved, we moved into illustration and animation. Even though this visual style was unique, it’s still a form we’re familiar with: illustrators create the 2D characters, backgrounds, and other elements first, then break them up into their individual pieces so that the animator can move each piece independently. This is the process of creating the “puppets” for the animation. It’s not that dissimilar to how our own bodies work: there’s a pivot point at the elbow, the neck is its own piece, and everywhere else a character should move is broken down. Each animation contains hundreds of individual pieces that all need to be organized in a uniform way to eliminate confusion and keep the project on-schedule!

The animation, as well, needed to be unique while keeping consistent with what the viewer is used to seeing inside the Amazon ecosystem. At this point, the majority of our team was remote: the art director in Northern California sends the animatic to the illustrator in London, who gets approval from the client in Seattle and sends the illustrations to the animator in Poland. Once the animation is accepted, it goes to the composer in Cincinnati to create the original music score and to the sound designer in Portland for the final mix before final sign-off from the Mew creative director in Boise and project manager in Las Vegas.

Website Design & Advertising Suite

It’s not done yet: once the original explainer was complete and deployed on-site, we got to work creating those additional pieces to round out the suite. First up were the cutdowns: 15-30 second versions of the video that can be used for things like YouTube pre-roll, LinkedIn sponsored posts, and other marketing and advertising campaigns. That means more animation work (you can’t just cut down a long animation into a shorter one and call it a day!), additional music, re-timing and re-mixing sound effects and audio, and sometimes more visual effects from an additional member of the team in Indianapolis!

Another goal of this project was to create assets that could be used in the redesign of the Handmade webpage. This meant mining the original video for frames that could be adapted with additional illustration work to create unique designs to support the copy on the page.

And with so much great content, we expanded the suite further to create display ads that tied the whole campaign together. We worked with the advertising team to define the verbiage, exported out multiple sizes, and gave options for split tests of diverse messaging.

We also wanted to support the email marketing that the Handmade team was doing. By selecting portions of the animation that work well as standalone 3-5 second pieces, we re-animate (and often re-illustrate) to create GIFs that look like they’re perfectly looped, perfect for email blasts.

Localization

Amazon is a global brand and the Amazon store is worldwide. The Handmade team is rapidly expanding, including into French-speaking Canada, allowing us the opportunity to localize the content to deploy on the French webpage and in advertising en français! It’s not as simple as finding a French-speaking voiceover artist and having them read the script. It takes longer to say the same thing in French than it does in English; the timing of the English animation doesn’t work! We could slow down the animation to compensate or have the VO artist read really fast, but we have a saying at Mew: “Be kind to the audience.”

We want to create content that is clear, informative, and inspiring to all audiences, no matter what language they speak. So for every language we localize content in, we re-animate key portions so it looks like the video was made originally in that language. We’ve localized content into more than a dozen languages including Spanish, German, Turkish, Japanese, Mandarin, Dutch, Arabic, and more.

It was a fantastic experience working with the Amazon Handmade team. We were able to create a whole suite of content that they were able to distribute for months, and they even called us back a couple months later to localize the original explainer into more languages as their brand continues to grow! For more on the process of creating the Handmade explainer, click the button below!