I’ve worked on both the Tech-Ops/Account Management side and the Creative side of digital content. Here is the step-by-step process of my workflow for a short animation called “Let’s Get Tacos.”

1. Concepting & Storyboarding

- Let’s ask questions and identify the KPIs: What are we trying to accomplish? Awareness, brand lift, PSA, strategic deployment of client assets?

Example: We want to create a short animation called “Let’s Get Tacos.” with all original assets. First, we’ll create a storyboard of the idea. Let’s have a cell phone sqawn from the bottom of the page with some fun graphics, then a little friend pops up and asks if we want to get some tacos, the view responds, and our friend sets the plan. This will need audio as well, but we’ll animate first since we do not have any audio from the client.

2. Asset creation

- Are you using original assets or branded assets? Are they vector or hand-drawn? (Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop).

- Is there a style guide? Do we need to create one? (Color swatches and fonts).

- Are we animating shapes or text? Is there audio, or do we need to create some? (Adobe After Effects and/or Premiere Pro and AVID Pro Tools)

- Is there video footage that needs to be edited/produced? (Adobe Premiere Pro)

Example: No creative or audio was provided, so we are going to create vector assets in Adobe Illustrator. Everything that will animate is created on an individual layer.

3. Production, Proofing, QA, & Launch

- Animation and audio are created in Adobe After Effects. (Premiere if video extensive editing/production is needed).

- Dropbox proofs for edits/changes until we’re fully approved for publishing.

- Are the KPIs being addressed? Are we set up for success?

Example: Assests are imported into Adobe After Effects and our animation is created. AVID Pro Tools DAW is used to create the original audio composition and imported into After Effects for sync. Proof is rendered for edits/approvals.

4. Implementation/Execution - Tracking & Campaign Management

- Are the assets doing what they were intended to do? Are they telling the story we boarded?

- Monitoring and optimization of whatever platform/ad-server was used for deployment and providing progress reporting documentation.

5. Wrap Report/Deliverable with analytics

- Summary for either the production side (Where was time/money spent creating this campaign) or campaign health (How did the assets perform against KPIs).

- What have we learned from this collaboration?