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Animated Podcast Intro

Animated Explainer Video

We started 2018 with a simple goal: Do more passion projects. So we combined our love of podcasts and our admiration for animated intro sequences—usually reserved for TV and movies—and created this experimental three-part series.

Style: Animation
Length: Varies

The Challenge

We challenged ourselves to create three visual interpretations of a non-visual media form—podcasts. To decide which three podcasts to use, each Duck nominated a favorite podcast and then we voted on it as a team. The winners were three very different podcasts.

One about crappy high school and college jobs hosted by a comedian famously fired from SNL, Entry Level with Brooks Wheelan.

One that follows a highly amusing game of Dungeons and Dragons with three lovable and unlikely cohorts, Adventure.EXE.

And one where warm, charismatic host, Nora Mcinerny, interviews people who’ve been through the very worst that life has to offer, Terrible, Thanks for Asking.

Three very different podcasts which called for three very different approaches.

The Solution

First, we reached out to each podcast creator and asked for their blessing to create some “elevated fan art.” Thankfully, all three were super into our idea and provided us with audio clips and logo assets. We used the music and audio their listeners hear in the podcast intro as our main anchor to determine the length and narrative of each video. And of course, we did lots of “research” listening to each podcast to make sure we created something the fans would feel like they recognized.

For Entry Level, we created a world of “rascals” trying to get though their work days and commiserating at the end of the day together at an open mic night. Brooks Wheelan playing the role of bartender, naturally.

For Adventure.EXE, we used their website design as inspiration to hearken back to the days of 90s operating systems, imagining their on-going D&D campaign as a computer game with some kick-ass loading graphics to match their kick-ass intro song.

For Terrible, Thanks for Asking, we wrote a short script for host, Nora, to read that give viewers an idea of what the podcast is all about. We wanted visuals to evoke the sense of melancholy and trauma attached to scenes from everyday life.