Step into the future of energy innovation and sustainability with our very last project of 2023 – a 3D animation strategically designed to announce and explain Nabors Industries’ vision of converging solar, geothermal, and energy storage for a 24/7 renewable power. This captivating journey is not just a video; it’s a visually compelling launch that brings a complex story to life.
Crafting this animation posed a unique challenge. Nabors Industries, along with a Sage Geosystems, Vast, and Natron, trusted us to weave together a narrative that seamlessly integrated various aspects of this transformative energy vision. Our task was to create a cohesive story that fairly and efficiently represents each collaborator.
Explaining and selling a solution that promises renewable baseload power can be confusing at best, and a pie-in-the-sky vision at worst. 3D animation is a tool that sparks that belief in its audience by providing a realistic vision and experience – seeing is believing! This 3D animation delivers a tangible view of what that coalition literally will look like, years before its groundbreaking ceremony. We can show how each component works together, even if the details haven’t been engineered yet.
Want to see how we brought this vision to life? Join us behind the scenes as we unveil the secrets of our creative process. Discover how we transform big ideas into unforgettable stories below..
Come, be a part of the storytelling process for innovating products and services. The future is bright, and together, we’ll illuminate it!
Step 1 – Storytelling Strategy
Each video that we produce is bespoke, and each is a new problem to solve with unique challenges. This story in particular proved to be an exercise in coordinating with multiple stakeholders, working with large scale scenes and 3D models, and telling a highly technical story in an instantly understandable and visually compelling way… oh and we need to present it at COP28 in under 4 weeks.
Defining the target audience, goal of the video, key selling points, and characters of the story creates the foundation of an effective animation. One new tool we worked together with the client to introduce into our workflow on this project is ChatGPT. With the immense power of AI, our team was able to feed our recipe for effective storytelling and specific key selling points from Nabors into Chat in order to immediately deliver a near-production-ready script tailored for 3D animation. And with aggressive turnaround times like this, every hour counts.
Luckily, we’re professionals. Telling stories that sell is what we do. Having an aggressive plan and solid process enables us to not only get the job done, but make sure our team and the clients genuinely enjoy the creative process in the meantime.
This one called for all of our brain cells to get on their treadmill, but we’re proud of the positive results and customer engagement the client received (and continues to receive) long after it’s been posted.
Step 2 – Storyboard
Making sure that the client understands our abstract ideas and that we understand their technical products is hugely important. Hand-sketching out the entire sequence on our ipad helps bring us all to the table to visualize the concepts that will be realized in the final video. Our storyboard process is to quickly illustrate each scene so that we can make big decisions about the composition, color pallet, story flow, and timing early on. When you see the whole video all at once in this way, it becomes much more digestible – revealing problem areas before they become expensive to solve.
Step 3 – Styleframes
Even with a detailed storyboard, it can still be difficult to visualize what the final product will look like once rendered. Our team of 3D artists create each storyboard scene and arrange each asset in 3D space so that we can confirm that the colors, textures, models, and text are accurate. This is another safeguard that enables us to make big changes from our clients before they get overly expensive.
Step 4 – Animatic
After the impressive styleframe presentation, this can look like a big step back! Trust the process! This gray, weird-looking draft is supposed to look like this, we promise 🙂 Rendering is time consuming and expensive, so we create the animatic in order to make sure it’s perfect before we render it. In this phase, the client has opportunities to comment on timing, accuracy, scale, etc.
Step 5 – Rendering and Compositing
Finally! The dynamic life we brought to the animatic is dressed with the realistic colors shown in the styleframes. The animation receives the correct colors, lighting, textures, sound effects, and visual effects in this phase.
Step 6 – Save the planet
Nabors Industries’ announcement at COP28 and subsequent press relating to the launch of its Energy Hub of the Future project has been met with ongoing excitement. The animation continues to be a catalyst for inviting conversations about tomorrow’s energy transition via Nabors’ social media, investor presentations, website, and tradeshows. We are passionate about everything we take on at Motion Giraffx, but telling stories that help further the discussion and development of energy alternative for a more sustainable future drive us the most!
