University of Manchester 2022/23
The brief
In late 2022, Manchester University were looking to update and reinvigorate their website content promoting courses for the School of Social Sciences - (SOSS), The School of Environment, Education and Development – (SEED) and The School of Arts, Languages and Cultures – (SALC).
After seeing a series of promotional films that Kilogramme had produced for the Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS), Denis Buckley – Student Marketing & Recruitment Manager for Humanities, got in touch with us.
He wanted to commission 14 films, 12 promoting specific courses, 1 outlining all their Humanities courses and 1 focussing on potential careers available to Humanities students.
The aim of the films was to showcase the selected courses in a fresh, exciting and engaging form to prospective students from a hugely diverse range of people.
The process
The films we produced for AMBS were engaging and informative with a fresh contemporary design style.
Denis was keen to use a similar, linking style for the Humanities films but with subtle differences to make them unique to the Humanities Department.
As the design of the previous films was specifically intended to appeal to the target audience, we decided to retain the ‘line’ style, but switched things up by going for a specific multi tonal colour palette for each School.
On receipt of the final script for each film, we produced a storyboard which was honed to maximise clarity and interest and then turned this into a timed animatic set to the voice track.
We selected a range of voiceover artists for the client to choose from, each with a bright, friendly tone. The two artists finally selected, Ally and Rob, were new to us and turned out to be a real asset to the project, both giving assured, upbeat narration to each film.
The films were designed to be a mix of of motion graphics and character animation, featuring a diverse and inclusive range of characters throughout.
We were pleased that the clients allowed us to occasionally add little touches of humour throughout the films as we find this is a great way to make the films even more memorable!
The team
Producer / Director / Lead animator – Claire Grey
Lead Designer – Maria Samaniego
Animators – Emilia Schneider, Gabi Germain, Devon Short
Animation / Design / Compositing – Cheryl Parker, Sean Jones, Ben Young
Voiceover Artists – Ally Murphy and Rob Goldstone
Client relations
We worked closely with Denis and Orestes Kousof – (Co-ordinator – Marketing and Recruitment activity across SOSS) and the rest of the UOM team throughout the project, which ran for 18 weeks.
We had sign off points throughout which were invaluable in making sure that the clients were happy for us to progress at each stage and ensured that the production ran smoothly and to schedule.