Here at Explanimate, we love stories.
Movies, books, comics, plays, you name it, we love it. So when a new video shows up on our doorstep, the first place our minds usually go is story. We try to find the hero’s journey of it all.
And sometimes, that is absolutely the best way in.
Other times, it really helps to shut that part of the brain down and approach the project from a completely different angle.
Prospect Environmental afforded us just such an opportunity.
Prospect Environmental are helping keep our roads safe with their new technologies. They were looking to launch a completely new service: SMiG.
They needed a visual style that suited the elegance and complexity of their tech.
This was not really a personal story. It was about the technology and the benefits it could have. We could have told it from the perspective of a family out on a trip who runs into danger and SMiG gets them out, but we all agreed the focus needed to be the technology.
So we dropped the characters altogether.
Instead, we approached it through the same dispassionate lens through which it was developed: focused on facts, figures and real-world outcomes.
The challenge was bringing that dispassionate approach to life in a way that could be easily understood and digested by the very people it would affect.
Creating a unique blend of iconography, flowing transitions and engaging visuals was no easy task. It required all hands on deck to suggest, consider, dismiss and embrace the right visual ideas.
We wanted to capture the way the technology is high tech, but dealing with something unpredictable and organic: the weather.
Which, famously, does not care about your neat little system diagram.
The style needed to find a bridge between two worlds.
The flowing movement and soft lines of the roads were juxtaposed with the dense but ordered tech aspects of the frame. Overlapping iconography, visual details and layered information helped create a world that felt technical, elegant and worth watching more than once.
The look needed to be sophisticated without becoming cold, data-led without becoming dry, and complex without becoming impossible to follow.
A small ask. Very casual. Nothing to see here.
Once we were certain we had found that balance, it was time to execute it.
The design was a vital component, but motion was going to be essential in discovering whether our vision for the project had worked, or whether we had gotten ourselves bogged.
Thankfully, those early planning stages paid off.
Once the animation was up on its feet, we could see the way the elements interacted, and how the transitions helped smooth the connection between different ideas.
Then we could all breathe a little deeper.
The final video helped Prospect Environmental introduce SMiG with a visual style that matched the elegance, complexity and practical value of the technology.
It brought together roads, weather, data and real-world outcomes in a way that felt clear, polished and purposeful.
Not all stories need heroes and villains.
Sometimes they just need technology doing important work, quietly making things safer for the people out there dealing with whatever the weather throws at them.
