The Baldwin Fund Promotional Video
Goal: To create a promotional video for a non-profit organization in 48 hours.
Role: Worked as part of a team to determine the needs of the organization, create a script, develop a storyboard, and develop animations and compile them into a short video.
Background
This project was part of Syracuse University’s Pixels and Print, an annual workshop in which design students work in teams to rebrand for nonprofit organization. For the 2024 workshop, Syracuse worked with The Baldwin Fund, an organization that funds breast cancer research.
I was on the motion team, which was responsible for creating a brief video to explain the Baldwin Fund’s mission and history. I worked with a team with seven other designers.
The video’s voiceover was provided by Alec Baldwin.
Process
For any animated video of this type, the first step is to brainstorm. We wrote down many key ideas, visuals, and words that we wanted to include to represent the Baldwin Fund. Two key visual elements we talked about were the cardinal and the breast cancer ribbon. The cardinal is a key symbol of the organization, as it is represents founder Carol Baldwin and was already being used in the organization’s branding. Including the ribbon was subject to some debate, as the recognizability of the symbol has made it somewhat cliche. However, we decided that the symbol was too recognizable to exclude, especially since it was also being used in the redesigned logo, and could also be used to tie the parts of the video together.
After the ideation phase, each person on the team developed their own version of the script, and the best elements were compiled into the master script. This would be revised numerous times, with a key focus on the specific words being used and the message conveyed by those words. Eventually, this became script used in the video.
The next step was to figure out the visuals, and how they flowed into each other. A lot of ideation occurred during this phase, and many ideas that were originally key to the video’s conception ended up being thrown out. One idea talked about heavily was the cardinal, and how heavily it should feature in the animation. We decided to use it minimally, to greaten its impact.
Deciding the video’s style was also a long discussion, but eventually we decided on a “cut and paste” style. We came to the conclusion that real photographs could capture the seriousness of our message better than animated images.
Once we had a completed storyboard and had picked an animation style, we began work on the actual video. The most efficient way to get this done was to divide the video into segments, and have each designer focus on one segment. I worked on the video’s introduction, which features the names of several people who have been afflicted by breast cancer. I had wanted to highlight the sudden and random nature of breast cancer by having the names come in at odd times, in a disorganized fashion, and at different sizes and opacities. However, too much differentiation among the names was too overwhelming, so I made the names more organized and made them all the same size. However, the spontaneous timing, which I felt was the most important, remained the same. I also changed the intro from white on black to black on tan and added the wiggle effect to adhere with the style of the rest of the video.
After each segment was complete, we assembled them into the finished video, and worked on the transitions between them all as a group. Finally, after this step, we had a completed video.
You can learn more about the Baldwin Fund here.