About The Client
The Isles of Scilly (IoS) were undertaking an ambitious project that called on the expertise of world renown technology company Hitachi. Keen to build their green credentials, they aimed to shift to 40 percent renewable energy by 2025 and to reduce the islanders bills by 40 percent.
Hitachi were employed to develop a Smart Islands Energy process, rolling the platform out across the isles. The platform tracks and manages energy supply, storage and demand – letting the IoS community better manage how it uses power, ensuring more of their home-grown renewable energy can be used across the network.
About The Project
As part of the project, the European Regional Development Fund part funded the creation of an animated storyboard that tells the story of the Smart Islands Energy project. This is where AndAnotherDay came in.
The Storyboard
This pioneering project needed a Storyboard which acted as a comprehensive resource library and online time-line for the project, while drawing together all of the project assets and threads into a single, cohesive and consistent platform.
The Storyboard needed to be flexible enough to be accessible to several audiences, including the current project stakeholders, potential investors, those with an interest in Smart Energy and of course, the islanders themselves. The presentation also needed to be fully transportable so that it could be featured on third party websites and web applications.
The project required a phased approach, delivering a visually rich user experience with the scope to evolve and grow as the Smart Islands Energy project develops.
We ensured the project had the capability to deliver multiple content types such as:
- Data driven charts, graphs, illustrations and infographics
- Third party content (including supplier and stakeholder statements, progress reports, blogs, articles)
- Videos (Talking Heads, presentations, experiences, vlogs)
- PDF Documents (White Papers, studies, research, plans)
Our Approach
AndAnotherDay started the creative process with a workshop session with the Hitachi team in Maidenhead. Our workshop bought together the leads of our creative and technical teams with those people within Hitachi responsible for communicating the objectives of the portal. We helped the Hitachi team understand what was possible within their timescale and how a phased approach would deliver their immediate needs and allow the timeline to develop in the future.
We helped Hitachi:
- Bring together all of the content types available within the project
- Prioritise the project, identifying the most important assets and content
- Steer the creative direction for the project
- Determine the technologies to be used
- Regular client liaison and project management
The AndAnotherDay team employed an agile system, running the processes using Jira internally to help share our project plans in simple steps. Clear goals shared within the team were regularly reviewed and helped to ensure that the deadlines were achieved.
Creative Direction
Our designers worked with Hitachi to ensure that the project matched their expectations and requirements for branding, visual identity and narrative.
We ensured that the creative direction for the timeline was maintained consistently throughout the project. Our designers have huge experience working with large brands that need us to work within strict guidelines. Additionally, our creative team are flexible and we made sure that the portal delighted and inspired the target audience at all times.
We achieved these objectives through the use of great content in a well-crafted framework – while maintaining excellent usability and accessibility.
Technologies
The timeline project employed a range of technologies, including GASP / Greensock for animations and transitions, PHP and JQuery. The resulting timeline is quick to load despite the many megabytes of visual data, and it remains easy to update.