In film and animation, the human voice lets you convey a lot of information very directly. But for our Dell Technologies animation, we wanted to reach international audiences as quickly and smoothly as possible, so we decided on a ‘no dialogue’ approach.

This meant we had to craft a story of how Dell is creating access to better technology that was compelling and relatable without being able to rely on any spoken exposition.

Taking a pinch of inspiration from Hitchock’s ‘Rear Window’, we set our characters studios across the street from one another. This allowed us to present Tom and Marie’s relationship in real time, without any backstory or other time-consuming story devices. This also gave us the opportunity to represent remote working and social distancing as themes in a very timely and relevant way for 2020.

Our creative approach allowed us to work quickly with the clients to get the look and feel outlined early on and go into production with a lot of the design work clearly mapped out.

We developed a simple 2D style for our characters and environments, using subtly exaggerated shapes and overlaid textures. To create a pan-European feel, we blended Parisian apartments, Berlin Streets, and a bit of East-end London attitude for good measure.

We took time to ensure that a rich cross-section of society was represented in our small cast, and we were able to infuse our tech-centric story with a warm, human feel through a carefully considered colour palette, and an overall ‘golden hour’ grading used throughout.

To give ourselves room for some 3D cinematic camera moves, we created some of the environments as 3D models mapped with rich 2D textures. We purposefully kept the camera work ‘real-world’ to avoid anything looking too ‘motion-graphicsy’ and keep the focus on the human story.

Musical accompaniment needs to support the story, and songs with lyrics can often be distracting. But we found a composition that not only had the same tonal warmth we had created with the visuals, it also contained the perfect message for the project ‘together, we can weather any storm’.