Remark
Bring the joy back to online shopping, with Remark.
Overview
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could buy a winter jacket without having to shovel your way through 1,840,000,000* search results?
Remark simplifies the online shopping experience by pairing online shoppers with real-life experts who will help you find that perfect winter jacket.
Not only that, they make the whole shopping experience more delightful with their fun, approachable design aesthetic.
So when they asked us about making an animated video for their official launch, we were excited to jump on board.
* 1.8 billion is the actual number of Google results for “winter jacket.” We checked.
Brief
Our brief was to create a 1-minute video to showcase the experience of using Remark.
Their team came prepared with a strong vision. They had style references, a color palette, typeface hierarchies, and design mockups — all of which provided great material to work with.
Their product was already up and running, so all the interactions had to look and feel exactly as they do on the app. Our job was to create something that would be not only beautifully designed and entertaining to watch, but faithful to how the product works.
Since Remark is all about connecting people — shoppers, experts, and brands — it was important that we showed how the app looks from the perspective of each of those groups, and brought them all together in a seamless way.
Pre-Production
Remark came to us with a specific track of music already in mind. We loved it, and right from the start it was our creative anchor. It provided inspiration for our creative decisions, and it gave us a common language about the feeling we were going for. That kept us on the same page all throughout the project.
We started with a round of design mockups to lock in the look and feel of things. We had some long, thoughtful conversations on where it was important to zoom in and highlight specific app functions, and where it was more important to communicate a bigger idea or feeling. Story structure, as much as motion design or typography, was a big part of our planning.
Style Frames
Final Storyboards
With the design in place, we did some rapid sketches and made a full 112-panel storyboard for every moment of the video. We then cut those approved boards into an animatic timed to the music, which gave us a clear idea of how the final video would look.
We revised our animatic and edited the music track to be in sync with each other, making changes until all the visual cues and transitions had some counterpoint in the melody or rhythm.
Final Animatic
Once the animatic was looking good, we were ready to do our final animation prep.
The design team at Remark had already done a great deal of work inside Figma. So we were able to take a lot of the designs right out of Figma and convert them to Adobe Illustrator files to be prepped for animation. That can be painstaking work sometimes, but the Figma to Illustrator workflow is a great way to remove any design guesswork and remain extremely faithful to the actual product UI.
Production
With this much prep work, so much of the concept is already locked in place, and all we need to do in production is execute on our shared vision.
But even then, there are things you find once you get down to the business of animation. We added multicolor highlights, letter-by-letter flourishes, gradient motion trails, transitions, sound effects, camera moves, and a whole bunch of subtle details – making sure that each and every moment had something special about it.
Individually, these details might go unnoticed. But they add up, and it’s always worth the extra effort.
Once the video was looking good, we did one final pass for sound design and a final sound mix, and we were all set for launch.
Final Animation
Summary
Thanks to all the planning, effort, and creative input from all sides, we ended up with a final video that honestly made us excited about online shopping again.
But we weren’t the only ones. We made sure to test the video with a core group of trusted partners. When people get to the end of a video and their reaction is, “Woah, lemme see that again,” then you know your work is done.