Objective
In 2014, the Lebanese Petroleum Administration (LPA) released its Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), which evaluates the likely environmental and social impact of introducing and developing oil and gas activities in Lebanon. Therefore, LOGI asked us to create an animation that answers the environmental questions that might come up regarding this exploration of oil and gas in the Lebanese waters. Some of those concerns included upsetting the offshore ecology, mismanaging the wastes, potential pollution, impact on fish and the fishing industry, hindering tourism and others.
Target audience
LOGI generally targets two main groups of people, the Lebanese general public who is interested in expanding their knowledge on the energy industry and the field experts that are interested in influencing the policies and laws. In this animation they also specifically target the environmentalists that have concerns towards possible consequences of the oil and gas exploration.
Implementation
With our fully customized illustrations, we brought to life the animation that takes the audience on a journey from the Lebanese shore, to the drillship, bottom of the sea and then to the final destination, the control room. Each element throughout the whole animation played a significant role in delivering a specific message to the audience and to answer the questions asked by SEA.
Steps
Our team met up with LOGI for our first meeting to discuss the purpose and content of the animation. Based on what our clients provided, we wrote a basic script for a one minute animation. Accordingly, we then created a storyboard and our illustrator designed 2 frames that show the mood, style and color scheme of the whole animation. Once we got the approval of our client, we resumed to illustrate and animate the rest of the video based on the 1 min time frame. Later during the project, LOGI provided us with an expert who elaborated on the script adding more technical details to it and extending it to 1:40 secs. In order to not redo the work that had already been finalized, we had to accommodate the already done animation to the extended timeframe by adding elements and fillers.
Features
- The small elements in the animation are not random, each one plays an important role in the story.
- The journey starts off showing Raouche rock to specify the setting
- Then a fisherman and a jet skier show that their activities and lifestyle are undisturbed by what’s currently happening under water, the exploration.
- The fish following the drill to the bottom of the sea show curiosity not fear to signify that the exploration will not harm them.
- The control room at the end scene shows the main role of LOGI and the public to keep a close eye on the procedures
Challenges & Solutions
The content we were provided by LOGI and the expert’s script was highly technical. It was our responsibility to research the whole procedure of exploration, the tools and machinery used. Once we had a clear understanding of it, we were able to stylize the illustrations of the process yet keeping it as realistic and comprehensible as possible.
Another challenge we faced was that the script was not finalized before we created the storyboard which was initially planned to be a one minute animation. The script then turned out to be 1:40 minutes, so we had to adapt the animation to accommodate that extra time. We did that by adding filler scenes, extra elements and extended some scenes a bit longer.
