Completed 2025
Investor Animation Explainer
Client: Hostelworld

In the middle of creating a rip-roaring campaign, Hostelworld approached me with another project; two videos for their upcoming 2025 Capital Markets Day. I didn’t even really know what a ‘capital markets day’ was – but after a quick bit of research I jumped back into my emails to tell them how keen I was to be involved.

As always, Hostelworld supplied a list of copy to occur throughout the video, with suggested visuals to be paired alongside each copy element. It was down to me to refine the visuals and bring the copy to life through dynamic text and 

A large focus of this video was to highlight Hostelworld app functionality, and so UI animation of various app screens would feature heavily throughout. UI animation can be a tricky thing; it’s generally not the most exciting thing to watch, and you’ve also got to be careful not to jazz it up so much that it loses its meaning altogether. Luckily I was given access to various Figma pages that contained screens upon screen of UI builds so my starting point was very grounded. I then rebuilt these screens in After Effects before imbuing them with a slightly heightened level of dynamism; elements lifting out of the phone screen, border highlights, and particle effects were the primary tools in my arsenal, and watching it back I think the UI animation throughout is engaging while still being true to the app’s functionality.

The AI sequence was a whole different ballgame; at the time of animating, the AI features were prototypes and hadn’t really had their look established yet – so it was up to me to create a sequence that established the idea that we were seeing ‘behind the scenes’ of the app’s UI at the inner workings of its AI features and how those might add value to users’ experience.

Sadly there was no interest in incorporating voiceover – but I was keen to nonetheless layer in sound design across the entire animation as I think sound helps massively with comprehension. Watching it back, I do think voiceover might have helped with making sure audiences are always clear on what’s being communicated; there’s a lot of text throughout and I sometimes find myself having to rewind it (but that might just be because I’m too busy focussing on the animation imperfections that I can’t help seeing!)