City Planning Animation Video

Comprehensive Plans shape how communities grow, influencing everything from city planning to infrastructure to public funding. But the people who make these plans need input from the community in order to know what to improve. 

How to inspire communities to be involved in this confusing, 10-year process?

Washington State’s Department of Commerce sought out to create a collection of resources to support meaningful community engagement in the Comprehensive Planning cycle. Their goal was to create a toolkit that could be shared easily, and took the hard-to-explain process and make it feel approachable and fun.

At Early Light Media, we believe in turning complexity into clarity.

• • We partnered with Uncommon Bridges and illustrator Elizabeth Lilly to assist Washington State’s Department of Commerce with this goal. Elizabeth started designing story-book style graphic novel pages for print, while ELM’s would bring the illustrations to life through the power of animation. 

  • The team was especially charmed by the cartoon representation of the Comprehensive Plan, drawn as a stack of paper with arms and a smiling expression. The decision was made to move forward with a very specific direction for the video, inspired by an oldie: the 1976 Schoolhouse Rock segment “I’m Just A Bill”, where the titular Bill character explains how U.S. bills become laws.

  • Our vision became to create a shareable 2-minute video where the Comprehensive Plan character walks us through the 10-year process of being enacted and hands out tips for how Community-based Organizers could get involved. We wanted her to be charming, engaging, and informative!

The video is now live on the Washington State Department of Commerce’s “Education and Outreach page and has been warmly received by not only Community-Based Organizers, who can use these resources to become more involved with the Comprehensive Plan process, but by Comprehensive Planners as well! Planners have said the video helps them explain their difficult-to-describe work to colleagues, family, and the public. With more understanding all around, there can now be more impact and positive change in communities!

Since our Comp Plan character would be taking our audience through the script from a first-person perspective, how she delivers her lines would become very important. Our team carefully auditioned to find a voice actress who would deliver a spunky and cute cartoon -inspired read, and then used frame-by-frame animation techniques to create lipsync to the resulting dialogue. Animation is a beautiful narrative to draw in an audience and influence how they feel about a script. With our Comp Plan character now speaking in a playful but informative spirit, moving with animated expressiveness, and drawn with care, she was well on her way to charm her future audience and teach them all about herself.

Our client has already expressed interest and excitement in further collaboration. We are eager to join hands on the next venture! This project has taught us once again that with great collaboration and some flexing of our creative muscles, we can create meaningful and engaging stories out of the densest policy.

Want us to help make your complex process more engaging? Let’s talk.