King County’s Design and Civic Engagement team created a motion graphic as a centerpiece to explain our new Forest Carbon Program. We also built a web page, a news release, content for social media, and an infographic to support and explain the effort.
The program offers local companies the opportunity to offset their carbon emissions by keeping forests intact in our region, making it possible for their employees and their families to explore and enjoy the protected outdoor spaces.
The target audiences for this communications effort are local companies, media, and the general public. The team selected a motion graphic as a communication tool due to the complex nature of the content. We elected to use open captions and not have a voice over since statistics show that most social media users have their sound off. We worked to balance where the viewer's eye would rest during the action while simultaneously having each line of text be readable and have the video's pace be engaging.
It was a team effort! A group of four crafted the story, created storyboards, advised on the script, illustrated the panels in Illustrator, created the motion graphic in After Effects, built the web page, designed and posted content to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and created an infographic and a map in Illustrator. Our manager even composed an original score to accompany the piece! The project took five weeks to complete.
The video was watched over 3,500 times in the two weeks since the announcement (2,633 Facebook, 695 Twitter, 265 Vimeo) and a local news channel ran our story.
The accompanying infographic is a spiral that starts in the center and grows as the amount of preserved forest grows. It uses illustrations that were developed for the motion graphic.
The map shows where King County's current Forest Carbon project sites are located.
