Cloud Academy Art Direction
Starting as a production team-of-one at Cloud Academy, my role was to support the production of the Cloud tech training videos produced by the in-house SMEs. Over the years the company grew and my role quickly changed to lead animator to Art Director and eventually Sr Manager of 4 distributed creative teams when we were acquired by a UK-based company called, QA. Here is a snapshot of some of my work over the 6.5 year run.
Making Complex Topics Relatable
When I started at Cloud Academy, the tech training industry was a bit dry to say the least. There were plenty of excellent trainers, but it was lacking a bit of polish, learning design best practices, and relatable visual metaphors. The nemerging generation of cloud engineers were used to much more robust and narrative-driven videos.
That’s what I wanted to bring to tech training. My goal was to make the complex systems and topics approachable to the novice, but not overly simplified for the intermediate viewer.
Aesthetics
I added sci-fi and gaming aesthetics to many of the visuals to bring a sense of cinematic quality to help engage the viewer. This included some HUD elements, liberal use of lighting effects/particle animations, and subtle 3D components to enhance the experience.
Its About the Customer
The set dressing and aesthetics were important, but I did make a concerted effort to bring characters abd narratives into the visual metaphors. Most of our customers were professionals looking to enhance their careers and obtain new certifications. It was important to me and the team to include a diverse set of characters to bring warmth and intrigue into cloud tech.
