Bugstick: Kickstarter Ad

Brief

A Kickstarter campaign often stands or falls by how the product is sold. Without a good video, it’s hard for backers to picture what they’re paying for. The assignment: find a campaign that has no promo video yet, and make one for it as its motion designer.

The video had to be 30 to 60 seconds, 1920 × 1080 at 25 fps, with sound the whole way through and no copyrighted music. We worked in milestones: a pitch deck, an animatic and the final render.

Process

Finding the product

The hardest part was the start. I wanted a product that gave me a lot of freedom: not a mechanical tool or a decoration, but something with a clear function I could show off, and a design simple enough that I could play with it. I spent about three hours going through different categories, and with every product I was already picturing funny scenes for it. Nothing was eye-catching enough until I found the Bugstick, a stick that catches spiders so you can put them outside without hurting them.

The Bugstick campaign page on Kickstarter: a black stick with a clear box at the end, catching a spider, under the title Spider on Your Wall? Move it Outside

The real Bugstick campaign on Kickstarter.

I had scenes in my head for it before I’d even started the storyboard.

The pitch deck

For the pitch deck we had to present our product with a storyboard, a style board and a style frame: one frame showing how the finished video would look.

Storyboard panels 1 to 8 in pencil: a spider on the wall, a scared person on the couch, the house on fire, a pause and rewind symbol, the spider in its web, the Bugstick catching it and the person holding the stick, each with timings and voice-over lines

Storyboard panels 9 to 16: the 60 cm handle, the 10 cm container, the sliding button, a person in a hazmat suit, spiders around a dead insect, catching spiders, the release outside and the end card with the tagline

The original storyboard: 16 panels, 55 seconds on paper.

On paper the story was 55 seconds, but I’d been playing the scenes far too fast in my head, and my teacher confirmed it. The feedback was that the story was fun, so the idea wasn’t the problem: I just had to cut scenes until it fit. The hazmat suit, the spiders around a dead insect and catching several spiders at once didn’t make it into the final video.

Style board with flat illustrations of houses, rooms, spiders and beetles, and a palette of purple, orange, mint, blue, black and light grey

Style frame: a purple spider with gradients inside the Bugstick's clear container, on a grainy light blue background with a yellow web

Style board and style frame from the pitch deck, before the style changed.

Animatic

Next was the animatic, to work out the timing.

The animatic.

Most of the feedback was about pacing: some scenes dragged on too long and others were over too fast.

Finding the style

At this point I wasn’t happy with my design, and I struggled with it for a while. After a talk with my teacher and a lot of Pinterest, I broke through and landed on a simple style that works: flat shapes, two main colours and thin black lines for the details.

Building it

I designed every frame in Illustrator, then brought them into After Effects so I’d have full freedom to animate, and built the final scenes there.

Illustrator with the BugStickAssets file open: artboards for the spider and stick assets, the living room, the man on the sofa, the house at night and on fire, the grass corner and a hand

All the scenes and assets as artboards in Illustrator.

The voice-over is an AI voice I made in ElevenLabs, and finding one that matched the project took me a long time, much longer than I expected. The music is from Epidemic Sound, so it’s cleared for use.

Result

The final ad, 56 seconds. Sound on.

This was one of my favourite assignments to work on, and it’s the kind of work I want to do more of.