Culver City, California, USA
★ Award-winning
Awarded the ASLA Southern California Chapter Merit Award in Analysis and Planning
Culver City
Parks Plan
Video Animation for Culver City Parks, Recreation and Community Services (PRCS)
At the end phase of the Culver City Parks Plan, OLIN asked LANDAU to create a public engagement video. The assessment has been complete, and the final parks plan is set in stone… they just need to tell the public! The client, the city and Culver City PRCS, wanted something fun and exciting to hype the end of the process. Their parks system has 13 different parks, and we wanted to make sure each park got some sort of highlight.
Culver City is a tight-knitted community and didn’t rely on an extensive social media campaign throughout the project. Studying OLIN’s project branding, presentation materials, and the work that had been done before, we had to create a visual style for an animation that sings praise to all the hard work that has been done. Since the parks plan was already in it’s final draft, the story was there for us to tell... but also the time was ticking since they were wrapping everything up in less than a month.
This project had one of the quickest turnarounds for a produced video. From script-writing, voice auditions, professional VO and audio, custom assets, animations, editing, and more—we proudly delivered a video our collaborators loved.
Collaborators: OLIN, Culver City PRCS, City of Culver City
Principal: Chris Landau
Story Lead, Head Video Editor & Motion Graphics: Gina Rattanakone
Motion Graphics Support: Yaoze Yu
Audio Specialist: Tim Day
Voice Talent: Khaya Fraites
Culver City’s Parks Plan
Learn more about the citywide parks plan here.
Production
Before Site Map Stylization (as seen on the document)
After Site Map Stylization (as seen on the video animation)
Storyboard + Animatic
Since the Culver City Parks Plan assessment has already been completed, most of the assets and graphics were established in their document. We took their graphics and narrative and wove a story for them to look nice in a watchable video format. Some of these site plans can be really heavy on the eyes (great on documents, but a total information overload if on a video), and we slightly re-styled them, hid some layers, added new ones, and presented information in a way that beautifully sums up the efforts and results of the park assessment.
Motion Graphic Animation
On a video with a tight turn-around such as this one, divide and conquer with efficiency is the best strategy. We had two animators on this team. One animator worked on the typical motion graphics and overall narrative, while the other was dedicated to stylizing and working on the more complex (but repetitive) site plan compositions. The animator who was in charge of the overall narrative also compiles the final video in the end.
Audio Team
While we were focused on the front-end of the animation, we had our audio professional Tim Day handle the voiceover recording, music selection, and final audio mix for the production. With great coordination, Tim and our animators were able to take this project faster than we had anticipated.