Confused? Us? Never! interpreting 2018 for confused.com

Ah yes, January.  After a stonking great break over Christmas, eating our body weight in (fair trade, organic, B Corp certified) mince pies and drinking enough booze to put a sailor to shame, we’re back!

Just before we went away we managed to squeeze in a fun project for our friends at confused.com. You might remember we did a 360 VR video for them last September called ‘The World’s Greatest Commute’.  (Ideally, it should be viewed in a VR headset with headphones for the full immersive experience.)

This year we were tasked with creating something a little different. They came to us and asked us to myth-bust some of 2018’s most confusing moments,. There were a couple of tricky things right off the bat. How would we visualise these moments? How would we pick them? Could we explain them clearly enough for it to feel social?

Obviously the answer was yes.

The Material.

First, the moments. We knew that the audience for this film was broad, so the film had to be as accessible as possible without missing out on some of the funnier obscurities points. We needed a way to make sure that we were hitting the mark.

Twitter became our barometer. We ran a search on Twitter to find out just how many people were baffled by it. If there were plenty, we knew we were on to a winner.

The Visuals.

We wanted a lot of warmth in the film so discarded the idea of stock imagery and screen grabs in favour of animation early on in the process. We wanted something that would keep all the lols without being (too) snarky.

We opted to forgo a traditional animation route in favour of a more practical and hands-on visual style. Cue bright, bold colourama backgrounds, abstract props and bags of humour and personality.  Using Day-Glo Instagram legends Matt Crump and Violet Tinder as our spirit guides, we amped up the camp and embraced the soft pastel rainbow spectrum to create a series of lively, bold vignettes.

Keeping things concise.

This was a tough one. We needed to make sure the film was actually explaining each confusing moment without over-explaining – it had to be snappy enough to keep the viewer entertained.

So We kept the script as tight as possible, trimmed out any chaff, and created two distinct cuts. One full length with the full year’s roundup for YouTube and Facebook, and a shorter 60-second square film for Instagram.

Knowing that this was going to be a media priority we made sure we always framed up for square and horizontal video during production, so that each version of the final film matched it’s media channel.

Fancy checking out how it all went? Have a little look below.