When NBS Technologies came to Distant Future, they were already using motion graphics, but weren’t satisfied with what they had. So we souped up their explainer animation, retro-style!
NBS Technologies specialise in both centralised and instant (decentralised) issuance solutions for the financial and security sectors. What does that mean? It means they provide systems for printing credit and debit cards, ID cards, EMV chip cards, and more. Our brief was to illustrate the process, end-to-end, so they could break it down for potential clients.
They’d had another team create animation for their Xpressi product, but it just didn’t make the grade. They liked the idea of 2D animation, but wanted us to breathe fresh life into it before they went any further. To do that, we offered to take these data engineers and technology experts back to their youth…
Retro-style Explainer Animation
- NBS Technologies
- Digital Security Products
- www.nbstech.com
Visual Design, Location Building, Character Design, Storyboard, Animation
It was a style I hadn’t done before, and growing up with the SEGA Master System it was a little nostalgic for me. I enjoyed it!
It was a fun challenge sticking to a strict colour palette and make all the assets work with the background, without getting lost in a sea of green-on-green.
Lauren Sharman, Project Lead / Distant Future
Normally you might expect us to finish what we started, but that wasn’t the brief here. The client needed to apply the animation for different uses. They wanted to be able to highlight different aspects of their service, and to reach different international markets. We would’ve been happy to generate as many variations as they needed, but that’s not what NBS Technologies wanted.
Joe Davis, their marketing manager, knew that if we provided the underlying animation, his people could add text and soundtracks. That way he’d have the flexibility and control he wanted — and we were happy to give it to him.
To make that work, Lauren and her team designed the animation to leave space for the text. Those spaces had to allow for potentially large paragraphs, but still have visual integrity with little or no text included. They also took care to build in pause-points throughout, so that Joe could change the timing, if he needed.
As you’ll see from their YouTube channel and elsewhere, Joe has certainly used the flexibility we gave him. NBS Technologies has recently joined the Matica group; we’re already talking to them about what they’d like to do next…
