Bringing Informa to life

When Informa – one of the world’s leading academic, training, events and conference providers – came to us asking for help to create an engaging corporate video to bring the Informa brand to life, we knew it was going to be an interesting but challenging experience…

It’s been a great project to work on as it’s had a bit of everything – scripting, music research and editing as well as illustrations, animations and a search for the right voice over artist. This was vital in providing the right tone and pace and we even re-recorded this to ensure the timing was spot on. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony proved to be the perfect backing track for the final video, although I think it’s safe to say that if we never hear it again it will be too soon!

The brief

Our brief was to add personality and fun to an otherwise corporate brand look, convey the diverse areas in which Informa operates, as well as its past, present and future ambitions and integrate both animated illustrations and video material into the final result – quite a lot to consider.

The first thing we needed to do was come up with the concept and style that summed up everything Informa does – not an easy task when the company spans a vast array of sectors and whose roots go back to the 18th century. So, it was a pretty big challenge to find an overall style and draft a script that summed up Informa’s ethos of bringing ‘knowledge to life’.

The process

We came up with the original idea of ‘the journey of the dot’, taking the dot from the ‘i’ in the logo to create illustrations and working them into an initial storyboard. From this, we created an animated demo to help define the style and developed this into the final version. The dot gave the video personality and allowed us to create the story around it – an engaging and quirky way of bringing the Informa brand to life.

part of the initial storyboard showing the progress of the Informa dot

We art directed a video shoot on location, filming Lloyd’s List – a core part of Informa’s business and the world’s oldest, continuously running daily newspaper – coming off the printing press. Not only that, but to communicate Informa’s multi-platform solutions we also filmed one of our very own staff downloading the latest edition on an iPad through the Lloyd’s List app.

Finally, to ensure the video had the right balance of animations and live footage, we also edited supplied footage of Informa’s conferences, exhibitions and ‘a day in the life’ of Informa employees for use in the final video.

Our head of Digital, Ben Jackson who was responsible for all the animation and post-production work said:

"This was both fun and challenging to work on – Informa is a really interesting company with an incredibly wide range of brands and specialisms, so we had to cover a lot of ground. Keeping to the target four minutes meant quite a few bits ended up on the cutting room floor (perhaps we'll release a 'Directors Cut' one day!). We also had to make sure we kept the pace up through the whole piece. Whilst the original plan was for a totally graphic based animation, we found that over a certain length, adding footage helped avoid 'animation fatigue' – this of course meant we had to beg, borrow or just go out and film it – which presented a very different set of challenges! All the graphics were created from scratch in Adobe Illustrator – these were then imported into Adobe AfterEffects where the entire piece (animation, video and audio) was created."

Informa is delighted with the final video and so are we. Graham Jerome-Ball, Director of Brand and Communications at Informa, said:

“The Informa corporate video had to achieve a number of objectives, include our history, our ethos, our people, our products and services and wrap it all up in a memorable 4 minute time-frame. No pressure there then but ToThePoint rose to the challenge and provided considered and innovative input at all stages. This project could easily have stalled but TTP team kept focused and gently prodded me along when needed and, most importantly, listened to our needs as they changed and multiplied during the project lifespan. Creative, friendly, communicative, on budget and a sense of humour – what more could you ask? 

What more indeed, thanks Graham!

See the video in full here or view on our website
the video can also be seen on the Informa homepage

Informa – bringing knowledge to life



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