Art Direction // Animation
Working with Congruent to develop a new podcast series for Cars.com confronting the incredible challenges to the automotive industry presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. The goal was to solidify Cars' brand positioning as a dealer advocate and to provide real-world stories of innovative dealers in order to help the entire community.
Along with the podcast series, which continues to this day, we developed a series of 6 animated shorts and 10 illustrations to be used by the Cars internal marketing team as a way to promote the effort.
Each animated segment was between 10-15 seconds and had accompanying VO from specific people within the automotive industry. My task was to quickly build out engaging visuals to help tell their stories. The sequence (above) is discussing the difficulties of working together, but not being together in a remote world.
Final cover art during the height of the pandemic ^
VO: "Staying 6 ft. apart, take an extra minute and listen..."
VO: "Federal aid for hotel chains and airlines (not the auto industry)..."
VO: "Everything that happens to us in life shapes us..."
The animations were grounded in the Cars brand standards but I had the ability to expand upon that foundation and develop this extension of the brand with a unique visual style. With a mixture of found imagery and graphic elements, treated to feel consistent, the animations have a look that lend themselves well to the testimonial style narrative.
Here are a set of illustrations used to accompany blog posts and marketing materials that promoted the series.
The above animated sequence served as a great call to action for all leaders in the industry - to put themselves "in the driver's seat" and ask themselves the hard questions about their business. The pandemic proved itself to be a time where many business owners had to take a step back and reassess everything.