Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal and Snapchat created a new channel to attract Snapchat users and younger viewers to the Journal’s deep, informative and plentiful content. As the main draw of the channel each story had a 10 second editorial animation as a lead in. Users swiped up for more. The challenges were 1) attracting and keeping attention and 2) communicating the headline and a feel for the story in 10 seconds. The intros had to be vibrant, fun and informative. A third challenge was, 3) since it is a news organizations the turnaround times were TIGHT. Our studio delivered high quality animations every week for roughly 2 years. There was a huge amount of creative freedom to create the animations both style wise and approach wise. This freedom is a great aspect of working with a new organization or a new arm of an existing organization. Original Original Films fast paced creative and openness to new forms has landed us in young divisions of media companies and start-ups for much of our existence.

The process of creating these “snaps” was as follows.... Every animation began with the news or feature story. Typically these were passed on to us via a content management system. The degree of conversation with the editors varied widely. Usually the studio generated a few ideas and then selected the best and checked it with the editors. This was all done in written form, not illustrated.

We created thumbnails and sketches. Sometimes they were simple, but they often required our illustration skills and talents. The illustrations were animation friendly since we were able to plan ahead and tell the illustrators what motion we were planning and what we would need.

Once that was created we had a day or two to animate. We were also able to choose music or sound from a library that worked with Dow Jones. The animations were a great success on both the Journal and Snapchat sides!