As part of Money Magazine's big relaunch on Time.com, I was asked to create this animation based on an interesting survey of married couples and their attitudes about money. It was an excellent opportunity to combine my love for infographics and visualization with more narrative animation elements.
I directed the project, Executive Editor Diane Harris produced, Brad Tuttle wrote the script, and Kristen Bellstrom & Taylor Tepper did the narration. This was the editorial team's first animation commission, so I helped guide them through the process and suggested some parameters for the script — something I've done on quite a few occasions with clients who are new to this kind of storytelling, even if they are expert writers and editors.
Writers often have the instinct to put a lot of words into the visuals, which is understandable. I tend to push back against that, championing more inherently visual solutions, and perhaps also allowing a bit less precision in favor of imaginative abstraction. On this project, we pulled it back a fair amount, but in my opinion there are still a few too many words shown in the piece, so the result is that there are a few sequences that contain too much information to take in. Still, the Money team was a delight to work with and the video certainly brings some life into the survey and makes it more engaging than a straight write-up would have been.
You can see more animations on the animation projects page, and as a fun aside, the music in this video was also a custom creation by EDLUNDART — listen to more tracks on the music page!