Valero Gets Animated
The beautiful part about being a proven, full-service production company is the amount of creative freedom that our clients trust us with. We usually don’t work as just hired hands. Instead, we work with agencies and their clients in a creative partnership that allows everyone involved to draw on years of experience and imagination.
We recently had an opportunity to exercise our creative muscles with San Antonio advertising agency One-Eighty on a national broadcast and internet campaign for Valero Energy Corporation. The goal of the campaign was to showcase Valero’s great business accomplishments, along with its generous charitable side. One-Eighty and Valero (who we last teamed up with on a 2015 Alamo Bowl campaign) came to Geomedia with a basic idea: Valero is a big, successful company that makes wise business decisions, but it also positively impacts communities around the United States in many different ways.
Starting with that idea, we drew on our collective creative resources to build an innovative, compelling campaign.
“Tom Norman and Lisa Breshiers with One-Eighty had several great ideas to support the concept, so we worked alongside them to develop a vehicle that illustrated this information in a smart and creative way,” Geomedia executive producer Zach Nasits said. “We agreed that this campaign required a simple, sophisticated style that would communicate Valero’s impressive statistics and achievements without sounding self-serving.”
Initial concepts incorporated imagery that played with icons of “the head,” to illustrate Valero’s business side, and “the heart,” to convey Valero’s charitable side. This idea was a good starting point, but Tom and Lisa wanted to push the envelope by developing spots that had more emotional engagement for the viewer. They challenged us to use our skills to come up with something truly unique.
With further conceptual design and development, we finally unveiled the right vehicle for this collaborative campaign. We decided to go with elegantly simple, 2D basic graphic icons and add complexity by having them flow and evolve into each other.
To convey this idea to the client, we produced new concept boards, as well as a mix of animation tests. Some of the tests were a “safer match” to what we anticipated a large corporation like Valero might expect, while others developed into something a little more experimental.
Valero decided to move forward with the style from one of the tests – which we referred to as the PR Softsell. This style presented Valero’s story in a way that embraced artistic potential and flexibility with elegance and sophistication. The technique was welcoming, confident and could appeal to anyone – investors and the general public alike.
Aesthetically, we all agreed that we should keep the visuals and audio score as clean and straightforward as possible to keep the story we were telling front-and-center, without any distractions. Simple colors. Simple sound score. Confident and compassionate voice-over narration.
Animation Director, Jeff Stoyer, along with animation generalist Martin Jaeger, completed the visuals over the course of several weeks. Turnkey audio post-production was performed by Keith Harter Music.
Our involvement in this project reinforces what we’ve always believed: Nothing demonstrates value to clients better than the combination of experience, creativity, passion and execution. Lisa, One-Eighty’s creative/art director said it best, “Geomedia has been up for any challenge we’ve given them through the years. They always bring innovation to the table and partner with us creatively so we can deliver a project that surpasses anyone’s expectations.”
Check out both of these great spots below!
Valero Energy “Did You Know” from Geomedia on Vimeo.
Valero Energy – “Did You Know, Pt. 2” from Geomedia on Vimeo.