The team at Planet Nutshell is very excited to announce our 2019 summer intern. Amelie Wang was selected out of about 50 applicants from the Savannah School of Art and Design (SCAD) Career Fair. Amelie’s portfolio shows a strong focus on story. During her time at Planet Nutshell, we hope she will continue to develop her illustration, mo-graph, and character animation skills, while gaining professional experience in the animation industry.

Amelie will graduate from SCAD with an M.F.A. in Illustration in June of 2020. We can’t wait to see what her future holds!

My panel on video production for nonprofits, titled “How to Create On-screen Magic in Your Fundraising Videos,” at the 2019 Classy Collaborative turned out great. I moderated as my panel-mates, Martin Quessenberry, Daniel Lovering, and Susan Hughes shared insights about video production — when to use it, when not to use it, how to hire creatives, how to tell a compelling story, and more — from their perspectives.

Marty, who is director of digital projects and innovation at Shriners Hospitals, had much to say about how to deploy video across multiple platforms (web, fundraising, social media, and more). Meanwhile, Susan, who is senior director of communications at Thread, discussed using video at a smaller organization with fewer resources. And Dan, who is a documentary filmmaker, and I discussed the production process, storytelling basics, and other nuts and bolts of working with creatives.

Want to learn more? I created a handy Google Doc that walks through many of the details of our discussion.

We’re delighted to have a new member of the team. Mollie Davis comes to us with a strong background in motion graphics, frame-by-frame animation, and art history. Already, she’s been helping us immensely with storyboarding, motion graphics, and general wonderfulness. Learn more about Mollie at her website.

Mollie graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from Northeastern University in a joint program with the School of Museum of Fine Arts. In her free time she co-organizes events for the local animation community, AniMAtic Boston, and her short film “Ellen” was released online in 2018.

We just wrapped up a video for our new friends at Thread, a Baltimore-based non-profit with an ambitious mission: Help weave a new social fabric by bringing together young people and volunteers to reimagine and reaffirm the notion of family.

Storyboard

Style Frames

A huge thanks to the whole team that worked on this project!

Writer and Creative Director: Joshua Gunn
Art Director and Storyboard: Jennifer Sanchez
Production Coordinator: Kharma Jones
Illustration: Zara Magumyan
Cleanup & Final Animation: Jennifer Sanchez

Learn more about Thread at thread.org.

We’re super passionate about serving educational institutions. So, it was an honor to create a series of educational animated videos for MIT students. The videos, which are part of a complete online edX course, offer students an overview of validity in qualitative research.

We were asked to animate several of the more abstract learning topics, two of which you can watch below.

Descriptive Validity

Test of Descriptive Validity

Check out The full MIT course and see more animated segments on edX.