LA Times and Pfizer present Dr. Santiago habla de...
A series of short-form social media content targeted at Spanish speakers, to dispel myths about the COVID vaccine
Overview
As global efforts to curb the COVID pandemic continued in 2022, Hispanic communities in the US had a higher percentage of resistance to vaccination. The LA Times teamed up with Pfizer to create a series of short videos where a respected medical professional—Dr. Santiago—could speak directly to the target audience to dispel myths and lies in an attempt to get more people vaccinated. I was brought on to add a fun visual flair to the videos.
Challenges
- With travel still restricted and budgets tight, Dr. Santiago had to shoot his segments on a webcam during a zoom call with the director. This led to a significantly lower than desired quality
- A personal challenge was that this project happened as I had already committed to a months-long film production (Blue Beetle, 2023)
Solutions
Along with the director, we decided to lean into the low-fi feel of the live segment and add graphics that were a mix of simple vectors and hand-drawn frame by frame animation to make the short pieces more dynamic.
We also incorporated an intro bumper with an animated version of Dr. Santiago, thinking forward to future videos where we could possibly just record his voice and have an animated stand-in to avoid low-quality video.
Process
I was handed edited clips by the director along with some loose guidelines of what the images on screen could be. This facilitated the storyboarding process because I drew the graphic directly on the video stills. As such, the storyboard looks like a screenshot of the video.
Once the storyboards were approved I took those same assets and animated them in After Effects, using native effects to achive the hand-drawn, frame by frame feel.
Result
Gravitee New Platform Explainer
Motion Graphics
Keyfactor DevOpsSec Explainer
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A Lupita le Gustaba PLanchar
Graphic Novel