If you’ve ever carried out enterprise with somebody in Australia that once you think about time zones and worldwide datelines, in case you’re within the US your end-of-workday is probably going going to be the start of your collaborator’s subsequent morning. There was a time, not that way back, when which may have been a possible dealbreaker.
But Spotify, with 15 places of work internationally, has no hesitation about their US group working with Melbourne, Australia-based Vidico. In truth, the collaboration between the 2 firms is so profitable that Spotify has them on velocity dial.
The key to their profitable relationship? A mix of extremely collegial groups and Frame.io. In this installment of Made in Frame, we spoke to Vidico co-founder Michael Pirone, who generously shared his expertise with us on a brand new marketing campaign for Spotify.
Location, location, location?
Along together with his brother, Evan, Vidico has grown over the previous seven years from a bro-and-bro startup to a group of greater than 40 producers, editors, writers, administrators, and designers scattered throughout Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, and South Africa. Even so, Michael estimates that greater than 60 p.c of their enterprise comes from the US and Europe.
Both Evan and Michael caught the video bug early and went to movie faculty, after which they started Vidico to focus on startups that had a novel product and to create quick movies to clarify the product’s goal. One of their earliest successes was for Algolia, a search-as-a-service supplier who stays a buyer at present—together with firms like Square, Deloitte, and Airtable—and about 450 extra.
Vidico makes a speciality of breaking down complicated merchandise and applied sciences into comprehensible movies and commercials, offering an end-to-end answer for his or her shoppers by providing every little thing from idea to manufacturing and ultimate supply. Their groups work onsite and remotely, which permits them the liberty to construct the correct squad for every shopper in line with their strengths. They additionally may group up with outdoors companions for illustration or animation, which is why Frame.io is so very important to their workflow.
But no matter location, their ethos is to democratize creativity. “We really like to listen to the opinions of all the creatives involved,” Michael says. “And what’s great about Frame.io is that everyone’s voice is heard.”
What’s nice about Frame.io is that everybody’s voice is heard.
It’s why large shoppers like Spotify maintain coming again. When you could have a very open dialogue, the road between shopper and vendor blurs and what you find yourself with is an actual collaboration. “We’ve worked with a number of teams at Spotify and it’s always such a pleasure. They tell us that it feels like we’re in-house, which is the kind of working relationship we strive for,” he says.
Uniting within the cloud
Vidico depends on Adobe Creative Cloud for all of their productions. Roughly half of them are animated, as is the case for the brand new Spotify Ad Analytics product, during which Illustrator and After Effects performed key roles.
Spotify, with greater than 550 million month-to-month lively customers throughout 184 markets, is dedicated to inclusivity of their branding, having run quite a few campaigns that spotlight the ways in which music brings us collectively. In this explicit marketing campaign, animated characters of various shapes and shades meant that the visuals felt common.
The totally animated video explains how advertisers can entry insights about their advert campaigns utilizing the brand new utility—which is creatively highlighted by the character and canine giving an internationally comprehensible thumbs up after they study that it’s free. The most important one-minute explainer was then translated to create eight further language variations plus cutdowns.
The Vidico group took solely eight weeks to provide the primary explainer, from analysis and scripting to supply. Creative Manager Keith Crawford, Lead Producer Bridget Chilver, and Co-Producer Kelsey Pettifer have been the important thing inner group members that drove the challenge. Because Spotify is a longtime shopper, they’ve a longtime package deal of illustration, design, and movement fashion programs that they developed collectively.
“Stylistically this video is part of a series of explainers featuring a modular character style and branding elements. The foundations of this style have led to optimized production timelines, as a lot of the usual questions we normally work through with clients are already set, and we can use design and ideation time to focus on visual content and communication rather than style development,” Keith says.
He additional explains their course of. “The project begins with an ideation phase with a written script, followed by a storyboard phase which we normally develop via quick physical sketches, and finalized storyboards drawn in Procreate. Designs are then created in Illustrator based on the storyboard frames, and once approved the animation team can use those same assets. We animate in After Effects, and then finish with music and sound effects to create the versions in Premiere Pro,” he says.
With groups working throughout three continents, in addition to freelancers in different places, a light-weight, accessible, global-standard software program pipeline is a necessity. “Creative Cloud provides that pipeline, and Illustrator and After Effects are the two pillars of our process for the animation team,” Keith states.
“Communication between the two programs is stable and well tested, allowing us to easily import designs from Illustrator to After Effects without losing any design detail or requiring rework, which is crucial in ensuring that our clients can see and approve visual designs before we animate. The communication between the two applications also means design changes, if required, can be updated with relative ease and reflected in the animation.”
The asynchronous benefits
The three Spotify group members Vidico labored with have been all positioned within the US for the whole thing of the challenge. But provided that the Australian group have been beginning work on the finish of the US group’s day, there have been truly some benefits to working asynchronously.
For one, Vidico might get notes from the shoppers and make the modifications whereas the US group was offline, giving them new iterations for them to have a look at and consider after they got here in every morning. In that sense, Frame.io was indispensable.
Even extra necessary, nonetheless, was that particularly as a result of the video was animated, with the ability to go away drawings and annotations on the body with very particular notes meant that even when the US group was carried out for the day, the necessity for the Australian group to ask them questions was vastly decreased.
The different important benefit of utilizing Frame.io got here within the localization part of the challenge. Because Vidico intentionally averted utilizing on-screen textual content with a purpose to decrease the necessity to do quite a few variations of animation, they wanted to lean into the voiceover.
For that, they despatched Spotify audio-only expertise auditions on Frame.io, which allowed them to simply consider their voiceover choices. “Once the voiceover artist and tonal reads were approved for each location, we supplied the voiceover artists with the original video on a Frame.io link, so that they had a timing reference, which allowed us to avoid retiming the animation across the nine videos,” Bridget says.
Once recorded and edited, the 9 localized variations have been then shared with Spotify. “The ease of file management in Frame.io, as well as the ability for Spotify to easily share the Review link with both the regional and the main US teams to add and collate feedback meant that review rounds were contained,” Michael provides. “We could also send feedback links directly to the voiceover talent, avoiding double handling, and could add our own notes and clarifications to be addressed.”
Seeing eye to eye
With so many consumers and tasks operating by way of Vidico—greater than 450 at present depend—retaining their pipeline streamlined internally is additional necessary.
“We group projects by client, and our entire production team has access to those folders,” Michael explains. “Within these folders we normally separate internal and external versions of the video to ensure that we stay on top of versioning and the client is only seeing approved versions.”
Once their tasks enter the animation part, Frame.io turns into an much more important device for Vidico. “One of our favorite features is the ability to draw and annotate directly onto frames, which is of huge benefit in directing feedback to animators. Plus, we use it with designers, sound designers, and voice talent,” he says.
Vidico’s success is essentially a results of their shopper’s expertise. There’s no shopper that wouldn’t wish to maintain working with a vendor who makes them really feel as if their enter is actually heard. And that shopper expertise issue can also be a part of why they take pleasure in utilizing Frame.io.
One of our favourite options is the power to attract and annotate immediately onto frames, which is of big profit in directing suggestions to animators.
“We always use Frame.io to share video links for review by our clients. We like the fact that it’s both simple enough for a client who has never interacted with video before to use and provide feedback,” Michael provides. “It’s easy for them to securely share with internal stakeholders without the need for passwords, and allows anyone to easily comment even if they aren’t logged in. Having one tool for all team members and stakeholders means we cut down on any missed feedback and double-handling. We also appreciate the speed and quality of Frame.io; videos upload in moments, with no discernable compression issues, which means our clients are seeing exactly what we see.”
A boon to enterprise
It’s at all times fascinating to ask our prospects how they labored earlier than they began utilizing Frame.io and the way it’s modified the way in which they’ve labored since utilizing it.
But as longtime Frame.io customers, Vidico can’t truly quantify the distinction. What they will say is that the mix of Adobe Creative Cloud and Frame.io are the way in which they’ve at all times chosen to work, as a result of it’s at all times made probably the most sense. Even after they first began Vidico, it was at all times clear that Creative Cloud had the built-in instruments they wanted to take their tasks from begin to end, and with Frame.io the collaboration throughout their ever-increasing group and shopper base made their progress as a enterprise that a lot simpler.
According to Michael, “If it weren’t for Frame.io, we would not be able to do business this way.” As for the way forward for Vidico, spreading their inventive wings appears a probable subsequent step for the film-loving group as they take into account creating their very own content material, and dealing throughout extra bespoke business tasks.
And as at all times, for us, listening to that Frame.io helps creatives throughout the globe develop their companies is music to our ears.
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