BUILD LIKE A GIRL 2022
Every year Miron hosts 30 or more girls for its Build Like a Girl event meant to get teach young women about a possible career path in the trades. The event starts off in the office as the girls trickle in to start their day, and the team wanted something visual to convey some key pieces of information as well as perhaps teach in a fun way. I set out to animate 30 minutes worth of content including some infographic sections, a character-based Women in Construction segment, a countdown, timeline, and information slides.
THE LOGO
To start out with, I did not design the Build Like a Girl logo. It was a pre-existing brand within Miron Construction. While it wasn’t my choice, I really love the logo and how it works with the target demographic. It feels very playful, and I meant to keep that when I started on animating it.
The first step was planning out exactly what I wanted to do. In my head I could see the turn and hammer swing happening right away, so that’s the direction I took. I needed to separate and cut out every element of the static logo, then rebuild it up again. The head turn took a bit of a frame-by-frame approach for some pieces, like the hat. I wanted to make her smile and wink as she turned, so that meant creating an eye and the smile.
In the end I was really satisfied with what I made. Not only did I use this logo for bumpers throughout the event graphics, I used the wink and hammer movement in the bar below all the graphics as well.
WOMEN IN CONSTRUCTION
The main showpiece in this entire show was to be a segment highlighting women in construction. I thought it would be fun to imagine the character in the logo in full color walking through a construction site as statistics popped up. This would be a fun way to engage the girls.
THE WALK
I had never attempted a walk cycle before, and that would encompass the brunt of the animation. After designing my character in Adobe Illustrator and bringing her over to After Effects to rig up, I set to work. To make things even more interesting, I included her signature hammer. I wanted to make her even more playful, not just swinging the hammer but tossing it in the air as she moved. This provided a major wrinkle in the walk cycle, as I needed her to move with the momentum of the hammer.
TRADES JOBS
One of the other bigger pieces I set out to animate was our Trades Jobs stats. I immediately saw the icons we used to illustrate these trades on the event banners and knew I wanted them to morph from one to the other during the slideshow. That was my first step here, creating a cycle through all five icons. These were also used in a lineup on our ending countdown as well.
THE OTHER SLIDES
With the schedule slides, I chose to use live versions of our previous years’ video to illustrate to the girls what each of these activities meant. There were also a number of what we dubbed “housekeeping” slides that we wanted to show to convey information as the girls came into the room, like where the restroom was and the schedule throughout the day. I did larger versions of these slides but knew there would be extended periods of time where those wouldn’t be shown but people may not have seen them due to arrival time or distractions. So, my solution was the angled bar at the bottom which cycles through the more important, yet more boring pieces.
