nCino
A Retail Banking Story
Client
nCino
Disciplines
3D, Creative Direction, Motion
Tools
After Effects, Blender, Illustrator
#01
Discovery
During my time in-house as the Senior Multimedia Designer at nCino, my team was tasked with crafting a story to capture a human-centric narrative, focused on the real-world impacts the financial services industry has on big decisions for families.
When nCino launched their Retail Banking solution, the company brought their software out from behind the bank desk and into the hands of bank customers. For most institutions, this was a revolutionary idea.
By bringing together document management, CRM and loan servicing in a single platform, banks are able to operate on a platform that provides both borrowers and bankers unmatched transparency into where their loan application stands.
Some initial character explorations and whiteboarding concepts for the project. We wanted to use 2D "paper-maîche" characters in Blender, so keeping shape layers concentric for joints was a big area of focus. That way we could "layer" pieces of the character together in 3D and have them move seamlessly.
#02
Design
Given the scope of what we wanted to accomplish, we set out to spend as much time in pre-production as we did on production. By focusing on solid scriptwriting alongside a detailed storyboard and animatic, we were able to foresee creative snags before we set a single keyframe.
The toolset used here was pretty unique to our team at the time. We utilized Blender to animate layers of 2D characters from vector Illustrations, providing capabilities for visual storytelling beyond the confines of After Effects' 2.5D.
Despite the shear volume of scenes and frames needed to be rendered for this, it was a labor of love. I felt it really captured the caliber of the small Creative Team at nCino (just 5 people) and how we were able to deliver projects on par with big agencies.
Way too much fun thinking through interesting ways to animate movement and perspective for 2D characters moving in 3D space. I watched a lot of Paper Mario clips for inspiration.