Our latest collaboration with Ogilvy sees the completion of five pre-roll advertisements for Lenovo, the global technology giant. We know, they don’t sound like they’d be the most entertaining thing in the world to watch – but that’s where you’re wrong. As always, our creatives went above and beyond, creating five humorous, brilliantly designed and engaging videos.

Audience-specific animation

Ogilvy’s brief to us was to create a collection of pre-rolls that ‘only IT managers and administrators will understand, with a call to action that drives them to a landing page for Lenovo Servers to learn more and get in touch with our sales team.’ But even if you’re not part of this target market, the videos are still fun to watch – a testament to our animators’ skills (and senses of humour!).

Our challenge was to animate something light and humorous, out of a stereotypically bland subject matter – IT. The five videos each offer a cheesy play on words – in one, a wife finds the cookie jar empty, and asks ‘honey… where did all the cookies go?’ Her husband replies, ‘I deleted them!’

"The process started when Ogilvy came to us with some rough, jokey scenarios that they had in mind for each video," said Jumbla's Lead 2D Animation Artist, Kane Rowlingson. "The target audience was IT professionals, and the gags in the videos were deliberately silly.

"We were loosely inspired by the work of Simon Landrein, as his work tends to always have a quirky sense of humour to it that we thought would work really well with the humour that was being conveyed in the scripts."

Landrein is renowned in the industry for his style of animation, and has completed work for WIRED magazine, MTV and the New York Times.

A planned and precise workflow

“The deadline was very tight though, so the process became very structured in order for us to be able to get it done in time. Frankie, Jeric and I all jumped on the project, with all of the character designs and rigs being set up by myself, and all of the background elements being illustrated by Frankie and Jeric," said Kane. 

“From there, we animated one or two videos each, and a final animation pass was done by myself to insure the quality of the animation was consistent across all videos.

"Since the jokes in the videos are all deliberately cheesy, we thought that the humour conveyed should reflect that, so everything from the expressions on the characters faces to the music and sound effects were all crafted in a way that would appropriately acknowledge and increase the cheesy and silly style of humour.”