Visual Design · Graphic Design

Home Road Films

Infographic film frames for a production house and its clients.

Home Road Films is a production house making infographic video for clients across industries. I designed frames — the ones that have to carry an idea in the two seconds before the next cut.

Home Road Films — the finished product
Role
Visual Designer, Storyboard Artist
Toolkit
Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects
Team
Soumya Sharma, Amrit Verma
Duration
May 2019 – Aug 2019

01 The studio

Script, board, frame, animate. I worked the middle two.

At Home Road the team writes the script together, and the script becomes a storyboard before anybody opens a design file.

The graphics are then built from that board, frame by frame, and the finished frames are handed on to be animated. It is a pipeline with no room for a beautiful picture that does not say the line underneath it.

I boarded and I drew. Over one summer that meant two very different films for two very different clients — one that had to feel like magic, and one that had to explain a machine.

  • Script
  • Storyboard
  • Graphics
  • Animation

02 Sumitomo

Sumitomo Brand Animation — magic, built out of light.

The client wanted a video that felt magical and read as unmistakably Japanese, and wanted it to never appear to cut.

I got the magic by putting a glow on a few chosen elements in every frame rather than on all of them, which is also why the palette runs dark and bright at once: the deep field is there so the lit thing has somewhere to be lit against.

They asked for a lot of Japanese elements, and for the frames to flow smoothly into one another, so we designed for an unbreakable flow, where each frame hands its shape to the next one instead of ending.

The film, in pencil first

sheet 1 Storyboard sheet: six pencil panels opening on a hand painting a kanji brushstroke, a spreading ink circle, a star-shaped pattern and a row of frames, each with a dialogue line and a red action note beneath it.
sheet 2 Storyboard sheet: six pencil panels of birds converting into glowing circles, a radiating sun, a field of tyre treads, and Japanese script panels, annotated with dialogue and red action notes.
sheet 3 Storyboard sheet: six pencil panels of Masatomo Sumitomo writing in his backyard, a tree of family generations, a figure holding a sphere, a compass rose, and a final panel reading SUMITOMO TIRES.
Every panel carries its own dialogue line and, in red, the thing that has to happen on screen — "birds convert into glowing circles", "circle converts into tyres", "sumitomo logo appears". The transitions were written before the pictures were, which is the only way the flow survives contact with production.

Eighteen shots, and the film never once cuts.

This is what is written under the pencil, set in type so it can be read: the spoken line first, then the thing that has to happen on screen. Six shots to a sheet, in the order the sheets are shown above. Read the action notes on their own and the rule of the film is visible — every one of them turns the last shape into the next one.

The finished film is not published here — the storyboards and the frames are what I hold.

  1. 01

    “What connects”

    Open on a traditional Kanji brush painting — one long brushstroke on old paper.

  2. 02

    “us to our past?”

    Shapes diverge from the line, depicting 17th-century Kyoto.

  3. 03

    (a beat, no line)

    Cherry-blossom flowers fly into the sun.

  4. 04

    “What leads”

    The flowers fly through the abstract pattern.

  5. 05

    “us to our future?”

    The pattern opens, and clouds appear as the flowers travel through.

  6. 06

    “The answers to these questions”

    The flowers become a Japanese bird, flying over the city.

  7. 07

    “are at the core of what makes a lasting company.”

    Two more birds appear.

  8. 08

    “For us, the answer to both is the same”

    The birds become glowing circles.

  9. 09

    “our philosophy”

    They combine into one big glowing circle.

  10. 10

    “the set of values at the heart of everything we do.”

    The circle becomes tyres.

  11. 11

    “These values go back more than 350 years to 17th century Kyoto”

    A tyre travels through Japanese script — the values themselves.

  12. 12

    “where our founder”

    A hand appears, writing the values.

  13. 13

    “Masatomo Sumitomo wrote a set of principles”

    He sits in his backyard, writing.

  14. 14

    “to guide the family business for generations to come.”

    The camera pans up and a tree appears, for the generations of the family.

  15. 15

    “He believed that for a company to have long term success,”

    He holds a sphere.

  16. 16

    “it needs to be built on a foundation of integrity and the common good of the community.”

    Zoom in: two shapes, one for integrity and one for the common good.

  17. 17

    “These ideals still guide the way we design and produce our tires”

    The sphere becomes a tyre.

  18. 18

    “and the way we run our business.”

    The Sumitomo logo appears.

Film frame: a compass rose built from red, white and teal rings on a deep green mist, with the four cardinal directions set in kanji at its points.
The frame the whole brief fits inside: a Japanese element, lit, on a field dark enough to let it glow.

Frames

Film frame: two small comet-like lights trailing upward through near-black space, the only lit objects in the picture.
Light alone, no subject.
Film frame: a seated figure in silhouette inside a broken ring of red and white dashes, lit from behind in blue.
Light as the subject.
Film frame: a tyre drawn as a glowing pale-green ring of treads with a wheel at its centre, floating over a dark green field.
The product, drawn rather than photographed.
Film frame: a brush writing Japanese characters on a dark panel, over a background of navy triangles and an orange wave.
The motif the film opens on, returning.

Nothing in this film is allowed to end. Each frame hands its shape to the next one — a circle becomes a tyre, a bird becomes a light.

03 Zivelo

Zivelo — the opposite job, where the queue was the story.

The job was an informative film: how to use the product properly, and why using it is worth it.

Here the constraint was the client's own brand colours, so the palette was decided before I started and the work was all staging. I built situations instead of diagrams: people waiting in line to order their food, and then the same street with the line gone.

Every character in these frames is one I drew and rigged, which is what makes the comparison land: the queue and the empty pavement are populated by the same people.

Frames

Film frame: four customers bunched around a single Zivelo self-order kiosk inside a warm-lit lobby, waiting their turn.
The problem, staged.
Film frame: two customers at two separate Zivelo kiosks on a city street, one walking away already served.
The same street, no line.
Film frame: a woman ordering at an outdoor Zivelo kiosk beside a café where another customer sits at a table.
One of the rigged characters, full figure.
Film frame: two hands holding a translucent menu screen showing a restaurant's items and prices with photographs of each dish.
The screen itself, in the customer's hands.
The brief was to explain the right way to use the product and the advantages of using it. A frame that has to do both at once has about two seconds to do it, so the situation has to be recognisable before any of the detail is.

One summer, two films, and the same lesson twice.

Sumitomo taught me that a frame can carry a feeling; Zivelo taught me that a frame can carry an instruction. Both only work if the idea is legible in the first moment it is on screen, which is the discipline I have used on every interface I have designed since.

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