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ARCHIE-WeSt Explainer Video

ARCHIE-WeSt, a regional supercomputer centre at the University of Strathclyde, dedicated to research excellence and wealth creation in the West of Scotland.

ARCHIE-WeSt Explainer Video – Sundstedt Animation

Credits

Client: ARCHIE-WeSt (University of Strathclyde, Glasgow)
Script & Storyboard: ARCHIE-WeSt
Style: 2.5D Animation
Category: Explainer Video
Animation Studio: Sundstedt Animation
Directed By: Sundstedt Animation
Creative Director: Anders Sundstedt
Animation Producer: Anders Sundstedt
2D Animation & Composite: Anders Sundstedt
Storyboard: Anders Sundstedt
Design: Anders Sundstedt
Background Design: Anders Sundstedt
Character Art Direction: Anders Sundstedt
Character Design: Anders Sundstedt
Prop Design: Anders Sundstedt
Editor: Anders Sundstedt
Length: 01:36

The Challenge

We were asked to create an animated explainer cartoon style video by ARCHIE-WeSt. They are a regional supercomputer centre at the University of Strathclyde. Funded by EPSRC, they operate in partnership with the Universities of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, West of Scotland and Stirling. Working together with the client, from initial meetings at their supercomputer centre and with direct contact on phone and email, we were to make a handcrafted animated explainer video about Archie. Archie comprises almost 3500 cores for distributed parallel computing providing almost 38 Teraflops peak performance, eight 512GB RAM large memory nodes, 8 GPU servers, 2 visualisation servers and 150TB of high performance LUSTRE storage. The explainer video is to explainer this in a simple, easy to understand way.

The Solution

By asking the client to provide the script with a basic storyboard, we then got a suitable voiceover talent for the project. Doing the whole video design and animation from scratch, we were able to convey the story in a fun, easy to understand way. We also used our own “2.5D” look to the video to add an extra dimension with shadows and texturing to give it more depth and make it more special, while still keeping things simple. The red tone color palette for parts of the video was suggested by the client to work with the story of the script, which worked out nicely as you can see in the finished video above.