First, let’s move past the politics of this thing. I’m going to try focus on the aesthetics, and leave the content alone. As I sit here drinking my Dasani, I’ve finished the Story of Stuff, the Story of Citizens United v. FEC, the Story of Electronics, and now I’m watching the Story of Bottled Water and thinking, these videos are great. Their format is a nice mixture of those UPS whiteboard commercials and Schoolhouse Rock.
I really loved the cleanliness of the production, which fit right in with their overarching message of being good clean stewards of the planet. At the same time, they fixed the problem of that style being very bland and uninteresting by adding just a little animation to give those static images some life. Each line is a little ragged, appearing sketched, and dances a little this way and that. So yes, it’s clean and simple and elegant, but it’s also organic and artsy and fun. The animation and artistry is where they moved away from the old UPS commercials. Those commercials were also very clean and simple and elegant, but the drawings were so perfect that they reeked of professionalism, which in turn felt corporate. Since UPS was running its brand with the idea of efficiency and accuracy, it worked for them. Leonard doesn’t want anything to do with corporations, as she made evident in her videos, so it was smart to take a step away from that. On the other hand, Schoolhouse Rock is just a little too cutesy of a style to be taken seriously on a platform like Leonard’s.
On the video side of things, I don’t like that Leonard is cut off weirdly at her thighs in the Story of Stuff. I like the weatherman format, and the nice sometime combo of animation and video is pretty cool (ex. turning the “tv” off), but there’s just something about being cut off right there that’s strange. On the other hand, I think her presence for most of the clip is a positive. I disliked the Story of Bottled Water simply because her voice-over was distracting. I liked having a face to put with the voice. The zoom-ins on the animations were lovely, but I thought it was smart of them to cut them off as they zoomed back out – it kept everything easy to understand.
On a separate note, I think it’s ironic that she bashes corporations in most of her videos, but utilizes Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube to promote her project. I don’t suppose she knows those are corporations?
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