THE MAARES PROJECT

The brief for this project was to create an animated video explaining a new project by Ambjent Malta (client), an organisation that regulates the preservation of Malta’s rural and urban areas. The project titled The MAARES Project, is an initiative in monitoring an ocean plant called Neptune Grass through state of the art drone and satellite technology. Visuals produced by these technologies would allow scientists to determine the health status of the plant in a more efficient way as opposed to having to send scuba divers to inspect the plant manually. I worked together with my colleague at the time, Michael Sant Fournier on creating the storyboard and the animated scenes.

Besides the storyboard, I specifically worked on:

  1. Creating the assets and animations for the 3-panel scene about pollution/plant wellbeing (the one with the harbour and beach scene respectively).

  2. Creating the assets and animations for the computer scene along with the user interface.

  3. The animations for the 2-panel scene about the satellite and drone and the follow-up scene with the photographs.

  4. The animation for the ending scenes where the camera starts at the ocean floor and ends with the logo reveals.

  5. The SFX and music and their implementation in the animation.

The total work took around 2 months to complete from storyboarding, animating and exporting the final videos (one with captions and one without).

The script was done in collaboration with Ambjent Malta, with the assistance of an external proof-reader. A voice over artist was contacted to provide services in narrating the script.

Below is the storyboard for creating the animation. We used this to explain to the client how each scene was going to be played out. We had initially developed a pen and paper version of the storyboard (a rough draft) prior to this version below. After we had a clear idea of how to move on, we started working on the visuals. The storyboard we presented to the client also acted as a presentation tool for us to explain our process in tackling this video.

Each scene had a lot of assets to develop, from the movement of limbs on our diver character, to the layering of the ocean floor and software user interface.