Brainchild and Buck LA have come together to develop a beautiful PSA for California’s Flex Alert program. To help guard against power shortages, this campaign shows California’s citizens when and how to conserve electric energy. You can watch the alternate versions of the Flex Alert spot HERE.
According to Buck:
Brainchild had a fantastic script that already had quite a few visual cues to leverage from, so our biggest challenge was finding a way to communicate and appeal to an audience that is pretty much the entire population of California. It’s a pretty important message that affects a whole lot of people, so we really needed to find a solution that was universal and that everyone from kids to grandparents could easily understand regardless of language. Once we got all those boxes out of the way, we also had to make sure it was fun, appealing, and interesting enough so that everyone feels good about a topic that is actually sort of scary.
We knew at the beginning that it needed to hold up to repeat viewings as a PSA, so our goal was to reinvent every shot to keep the audience on their toes while able to understand it right away. There were a few moments we knew we wanted, so a lot of the challenge was reverse-engineering it from those moments and figuring out creative ways to get to and from each part.
Our animators had the biggest challenge as they needed to create an animation style that was simple, yet had its own voice. Everyone had their own vision, so there was a lot of exploration before we knew what our style was. The Community spot, shot with forced parallax, was particularly tricky as it was a 2D abstraction of a 3D move, and nobody really knew what that would look like at first.
Overall, it was a very smooth process and it really helped that people liked what we were doing. There was never a point when any ideas got thrown out or we had to start over, which really made it gratifying. In the end, the project being enjoyable to work on made it enjoyable to watch.
Buck: Flex Alert
Project: Flex Alert California
Client: McGuire & Company
Agency: Brainchild Creative
Executive Creative Director: Jef Loeb
Creative Director: Chris Chaffin
Executive Producer: Stephanie Heinsohn
Graphics: Buck TV Los Angeles
Creative Director: Ryan Honey
Executive Producer: Maurie Enochson
Producer: Emily Rickard, Ashley Hsieh
Associate Creative Director: Joshua Harvey
Art Director: Sean Dekkers
Designers: Sean Dekkers, Joshua Harvey, Trevor Conrad, Jenny Ko, Ege Soyuer, Alexis Lim
Animation Director: Moses Journey
Lead Animator: Jake Portman
Animation: Moses Journey, Vincent Lammers, Iain Acton, Alexis Lim, Daniel Zhang, Ege Soyuer
Software: After Effects
Music: Sun of Z