Hexagon

As part of a series of corporate animated videos Deep Sky and Etage produced for Hexagon, ‘Shaping Smart Change’ was the opener for the HxGN conference and essentially a purpose statement video for the Hexagon brand.

While we had already developed an overall visual style in the previous videos, determining the visuals meant really taking the time to understand Hexagon’s values and mission, with a lot of careful conceptualization and asset creation, so we could accurately reflect their message in a simplified and refined animated form. Particular attention needed to be paid to the script, narrator, and composer as well. Timing down to each frame was critical and each piece had to compliment each other perfectly to achieve a kind of fluidity and graceful flow.

For the most recent HxGN Live conference in Las Vegas, we teamed up with Etage to produce a live show open experience to introduce the keynote speaker with flair. Each year HxGN pushes to do something new that will wow the audience. This year our challenge was to design an 8,000-pixel wide video in the branded style of Hexagon while working with a professional dancer 600 miles away.

We had created a “rhythmic dance” between an eloquently written script and perfectly timed animation in the past for HxGN, but producing one in real time was a different story.  With a 100' x 16' screen and a 64' stage, timing and scale were naturally the biggest challenges. In order to create the dancer's silhouette character for the video, we had to do the math, the size of our dancer and screen and storyboard the keyframes. Our 2D animator hand drew rough character animations of the dancer to estimate tempo and timing for the animation. We Skyped in during a shoot in San Francisco to direct the the dancer's movements on green screen while referencing our animatic.

Deep Sky produced a series of animated corporate videos for Hexagon promoting their individual departments and their unique missions within the company umbrella. Hexagon’s branding style is very specific, so a lot of time went into distinguishing the overall look and flow of the series. The challenge was taking ideas that were very complex and distilling them into simplified visuals that elegantly flowed with a poetic script.

We used basic shapes as a theme to reflect the Hexagon mission of “shaping smart change.” For Safety and Infrastructure, the “line” tells the story of how the department is “shaping outcomes.” A set of rules for sizing shapes had to be defined during asset creation to keep everything cohesive. We tweaked the conceptualized storyboards and designs for weeks until every scene complimented one another and flowed effortlessly.

In our second video for the Hexagon series Deep Sky produced with étage, we encountered a new challenge to add to the already demanding task of interpreting complex and poetic messaging into unique illustrative visuals that stayed cohesive with the existing brand.

'The Change You Shape' is one of our conference openers which played behind talent, timed with his poetry. Pretty awesome seeing this on a huge ultra-wide 8k stage screen!