Free Up - athenahealth
More Time (:15)
Vision (:15)
More Time (:06)
Vision (:06)
Client story
Healthcare giant athenahealth built their business on reducing administrative burden, to allow providers more time to focus on their patients. As part of “Free Up,” a campaign launched by Genuine, we created a series of YouTube pre-roll spots to show viewers how athenahealth does just that.
Craft story
This project was a delightful exercise in rigging readymade, client-provided artwork. When the first boards for More Time crossed my desk, though, the first frame featured something a little unexpected: a bird. Opening the first spot with our little bird character was an airy, fun way to set up the rest of the story, but of course that meant I needed to figure out how bird flight actually worked.
Thanks to animator Brendan Body, I didn’t have to start from scratch. His great posts on bird flight in animation helped me realize that everything I’d assumed about bird flight was almost exactly backwards. We often think of flight as swimming through air, with wing flaps similar to arm strokes through water. That image inspires a certain kind of posing, wherein the bird uses its wings to pull itself through the air, but that’s just not how lift works. Instead, pulling the wings counter-intuitively “backward” actually serves to create a little vacuum beneath the wings, which are then supported and lifted up by the incoming rush of air from underneath.
Teaching our bird to work smarter, instead of harder.
But why does it matter if the action of a wing flap is technically accurate, when we’re just looking at a flat 2D illustration with a 20-frame flap cycle? While our assumptions about the mechanics of bird flight may be wrong, our gut feelings about whether an animated bird looks like it’s really flying are always right. If our bird was animated using the “swimming” method, with wings pulling air back and hindquarters flopping like a noodle behind, we would intuitively know that something is off; it looks like a lot of effort for the bird. However, with the wings creating lift, and powerful tail feathers stabilizing its path, our simple bird looks a little more “freed up.”
The difference is subtle in situ, but I think the bird was grateful, at least.
Personal story
Freed Up broke a three-year dry spell in my character animation journey, allowing me to dust off my DuIK skills and exercise a little dash of narrative storytelling through expression and editorial. Having reference artwork provided by our client and adapted by our in-house design team freed me up to focus on the fundamentals, a real breath of fresh air.
The best part was that this job didn’t just drop into our laps. A few months earlier, athenahealth came to Genuine looking for help adding a “light touch of animation” to a library of character illustrations they’d commissioned. The request didn’t engage much of our creative team and it largely fell on my shoulders to lead the effort. Hungry for some rigging experience (and possessed of a pretty light workload at the time), I took the opportunity to over-deliver, and the client was so stoked with the results that they asked us for more. Rainmaking isn’t generally part of my job description, so it was a special treat to see my effort strengthen our relationship with the client in such a direct way.
Credits
Rigging & animation by Jared Flynn.
Agency: Genuine
Client: athenahealth