The request came from the Booking team at HBS, and it wasn't quite the problem I expected. They were preparing broadcast positions for the Rugby World Cup, and the written information was already there — where each position sat, what it over looked, what facilities came with it, everything a broadcaster needed to make a decision. There was nothing wrong with the communication itself. People could read it. They understood it. The problem was that understanding a broadcast position and being able to imagine yourself using it turned out to be two different things, and that distinction is what changed the brief.
My first instinct was to treat the 3D animation as another form of explanation — build the stadium, reproduce the positions, give broadcasters a more literal view of what the document was already describing. That would have been solving a problem the writing had already solved. What the specification couldn't do was make the offer feel tangible, so that became the animation's actual job.
We deliberately simplified the stadium environment rather than trying to reproduce it photorealistically. I stripped back the surrounding architecture. The broadcast infrastructure and camera positions got the visual emphasis instead, with figures and equipment left in to provide scale and context. Then the camera moved through the stadium rather than simply displaying it — and a line in a specification describing a broadcast position inside a large venue suddenly had a physical relationship to the pitch, to the production environment around it, and to the people who'd actually be working there. The animation wasn't replacing the information. It was giving the information somewhere to live.
That distinction has stayed with me, because visual communication problems aren't always comprehension problems. Sometimes an audience understands perfectly well what you're telling them, and the missing piece is interest, or the ability to imagine what that information actually means for them. There's research behind this too. Les Binet and Peter Field's research for LinkedIn's B2B Institute found that rational communication tends to drive short-term activation, while emotional communication plays a larger role in long-term brand building.
My first instinct was to treat the 3D animation as another form of explanation — build the stadium, reproduce the positions, give broadcasters a more literal view of what the document was already describing. That would have been solving a problem the writing had already solved. What the specification couldn't do was make the offer feel tangible, so that became the animation's actual job.
We deliberately simplified the stadium environment rather than trying to reproduce it photorealistically. I stripped back the surrounding architecture. The broadcast infrastructure and camera positions got the visual emphasis instead, with figures and equipment left in to provide scale and context. Then the camera moved through the stadium rather than simply displaying it — and a line in a specification describing a broadcast position inside a large venue suddenly had a physical relationship to the pitch, to the production environment around it, and to the people who'd actually be working there. The animation wasn't replacing the information. It was giving the information somewhere to live.
That distinction has stayed with me, because visual communication problems aren't always comprehension problems. Sometimes an audience understands perfectly well what you're telling them, and the missing piece is interest, or the ability to imagine what that information actually means for them. There's research behind this too. Les Binet and Peter Field's research for LinkedIn's B2B Institute found that rational communication tends to drive short-term activation, while emotional communication plays a larger role in long-term brand building.
