The Challenges

One of the key benefits that Amazon Prime members enjoy is free online ordering and curbside pickup from Whole Foods Market. As the challenges of the 2020 pandemic unfolded, it was more important than ever for retailers to make their stores more accessible. Whole Foods Market on Amazon (WFMOA) offers the convenience and quality that our customers expect and we needed to communicate that to our current customers and potential Prime members in the most concise and eye-catching way possible. In addition to making a rather mundane process seem fun and engaging, we needed the story to remain evergreen through 2020 and beyond.

Finally, we needed to create a video that worked across multiple platforms. Not only did it need to look good, but it also needed to look good in four aspect ratios (1:1, 16:9, 9:16, 4:3) and effectively communicate the process in under 60 seconds.

My Role

I was tasked with leading this project with the support of one writer and a producer. I also used this project as an opportunity to share my knowledge and experience with storyboarding and art directing video, photography, and animation with a fellow designer who joined me on pre-production meetings, shoots, and reviews with vendors.

Creating The Narrative

Although the online ordering process is relatively simple, we needed to keep the video as concise as possible. If the video was too long, viewers would lose interest and it would not meet the requirements of our social channels. If it was too short we run the risk of not communicating each essential step of the process. Our writers worked with our Whole Foods on Amazon team to find the right balance and cover all legal requirements.

Once we had the outline drafted, we worked together to find the best format. We landed on a step-based format and organized the process into the appropriate sections: Order, Schedule, Shopping, Pick-up. Breaking the process into steps was a good way to give viewers a small break to absorb each step. It also allowed us more flexibility in how we used the video because we could trim the video into 4-5 different sections. This would be very helpful to the social team as they would need smaller videos to post to the Whole Foods Market Instagram and Facebook stories.

Finding A Style

Since this video would not live under an existing campaign I was not locked into a predetermined style. This was an opportunity to do something fun and unique. I began by researching what other companies had done for instructional videos. Many of them used flat design aesthetics or complex motion graphics that looked great but didn’t seem to contribute to the overall narrative.

After researching styles that might work well with our brand, I landed on the idea of leveraging the aesthetic of our food photography and mixing in some hand-drawn illustrations and typography.

I chose to use stop motion animation using real food ingredients and hand-drawn elements on a paper texture to ground the objects in space and tie everything together and gathered reference material and created a deck of art direction notes and a detailed storyboard to get bids from several animation studios that we believed could bring our vision to life.

Bringing The Vision to Life

Upon receiving stylings from several studios, we decided to move forward with Partizan Studio. For two months we worked closely with Partizan by holding planning sessions and weekly Zoom reviews of rough cuts. I provided them with a list of approved products to be featured in the video as well as custom-designed type lockups and examples for props used in the video. Partizan then worked with a stop motion animator to capture the finalized animated food, whom I had hourly virtual sign-offs with during each of the shot sequences.

This proved to be a challenge because the stop motion animator had limited availability within our schedule so we had to fit all shot sequences into a two-day shoot. This meant that we had to have a high level of flexibility while taking care of our already-elevated holiday workload. We had to be prepared to quickly shift focus and review sequences that Partizan sent and make quick calls to keep on schedule or we wouldn’t be able to capture all the shots we needed.

After two weeks of minor adjustments, the video was finalized and posted to the Whole Foods Market website, Instagram, and Facebook pages.