Lyra Care for Teens
Project Type
Animation Production, Art Direction, Creative Strategy
Role
Art Director & Animator
Deliverables
An educational video series that is designed for the teen member experience.
Timeline
2.5 years
Problem
The [younger] user need
In 2022, Lyra was expanding care options to reach new demographics. Strategy and analysis showed that there wasn’t much supplemental content on topics relevant to teens. The challenge was: How can we better make adolescent care relatable, engaging, and suitable for a younger audience?
Solution
New content for a new audience
Using a storytelling approach, the solution involved creating a story-driven, episodic series specifically for teens. The team used the opportunity to develop a fresh, distinctive animation style featuring engaging visuals, relatable scenarios for the audience, and a grounded narrative that teens can see themselves in, regardless of who the main character is.
Strategy & Approach
Creating and building a pipeline from scratch
This was the first time Lyra brought this type of work internally with a dedicated development team. With that came its challenges of not having existing frameworks or processes in place. Having experience in a production pipeline, I started with what I knew as a baseline and began adjusting the process to accommodate cross-functional team stakeholders who were not traditionally part of the pipeline. It took a few iterations, but after three episode cycles, the team found the process of getting work done predictable and reliable. This made collaboration efforts across different team stakeholders easier and more effective.
The Iron Triangle and future proofing to scale workflow
When assessing tradeoffs for a large initiative, the iron triangle shapes strategy. The three buckets—quality, cost, and time—pose tough challenges but also inspire creative problem-solving and open new paths to the goal. For this long-term project, I created animation standards to guide team decisions during lesson creation. As the project progressed, we developed shortcuts to speed up animation. Throughout development, the team and I made purposeful choices for certain sequences based on these standards, helping us stay within time constraints. Ultimately, this process produced a repeatable formula that follows established visual and story patterns and smartly reuses assets whenever possible.
Art Direction - Creating a new visual world
While developing the look and feel of the series, it was important to utilize a distinct color story for the main characters and their design. A color story helps emphasize personality and other character traits in a subliminal way. Color also played a key role throughout the animated series, helping set the tone and mood of a scene and driving emotional connection in the narrative.
Character designs, props, backgrounds, and informational cards for the series were crafted and designed to be memorable and help clinical concepts stick. Backed by in-depth user research, the visual art direction played a major role in the series' success, earning praise from providers and clients alike.
