Brand launch film
Payscale
Motion with meaning: launching Payscale's new identity into the world.
The Brief
Partnering with our friends at Fight or Flight, we helped create a launch film for PayScale's new brand identity. The film was built to work both internally and externally, generating excitement around the launch while getting internal teams aligned on key messaging.Fight or Flight had led PayScale's rebrand and developed a full set of new design identity elements. Our job was to take those elements and work out how they should move.
We discussed with the team which elements they wanted to see brought into the animation, then explored how each would translate into motion. The core question we needed to answer was simple to ask and harder to solve: what does this brand look like in motion, and how should it feel when it moves?
Our Approach
Because the assets we developed in motion would also be repurposed as end frames and used more widely across the brand, we treated early development as a collaborative process rather than a fixed output. We built different iterations of key elements, such as the logo animation, so we could walk both the Fight or Flight team and PayScale through our thinking and hear theirs in return.
That back-and-forth helped ensure every piece of motion had real intent behind it, rather than movement for its own sake. Once we had a clear sense of direction, we moved into designing and developing the look and feel of the rest of the film, building in the core elements of the brand.
The Creative
Those initial designs evolved into a full storyboard, which we used to map out the narrative and lay out each scene. Sound played a central role in bringing the film together. Music adds energy and helps steer the emotional direction of a narrative, so alongside a strong voiceover, we layered in kinetic typography and a bespoke soundtrack with custom SFX, all designed to reinforce the story and reflect PayScale's values.
