Completed 2024
Brand Animation Development
Client: Bauer Media Group
Working with Bauer was something I never expected to do; especially because they’ve been one of the only clients I’ve ever got that have reached out to me via the contact form on this very website. And not because they were so blown away with my style that they wanted a piece of that magic for their own brand, but because they got me mixed up with a different Jack Allen who also animates. This was a rare instance of where having a common name actually worked in my favour! I came clean on our first call that I wasn’t the Jack Allen they were looking for – but no matter, the animation had to be animated and I was the man for the job.
Bauer were in the middle of fleshing out their brand guidelines and they were keen to establish a set of animated elements that could be used company-wide for internal and external communications. Detailed brand guidelines seem to be such a luxury – so often I rock up and the client doesn’t even have a preferred font or colour palette – so to be involved in the creation of guidelines was a wonderful luxury.
I created a set of animated ‘stamps’, logo overlays, and transitions – all templated in flexible MOGRT files so that editors would be able to easily slot them into projects, rather than having to dig into After Effects projects (and potentially go off-guideline!). A selection of these can be enjoyed below:
Below are two of the overlays I created. The animation was simple enough – but it was the template structure the proved trickier. They had to be built so that the cycling animations would exit smoothly at the exit point established by an editor, rather than just snapping to their exit states – luckily my background in programming killer apps came in handy here.