Our friends over at Think Ahead Studios had a busy year. Here are some of our favorite animation projects they put out in 2017. Return Path – Sender ScoreReturn Path is a tool marketers can use to make sure the emails they send make it to the customers they’re meant for. The animation we created for Return Path needed to show an audience of mid-level marketing managers — think marketing coordinators, email coordinators, and digital marketing specialists — how Return Path’s Sender Score feature serves as an easy tool for monitoring and improving email marketing efforts. Without concrete brand guidelines or past animations to draw a style from, we had to find inspiration on the Return Path website and Sender Score campaign landing page. The final animation uses the illustrative style characteristic of Return Path and energetic motion to demonstrate the ease and utility of the tool. It set the standard for subsequent Return Path animations. SamTec – AcceleRate®HDSamtec is an industry leader in the design and manufacture of electronic components. Their target audience consists of designers and engineers who build computers and high-tech equipment. Their buyers care about every nitty-gritty detail of how a new or upcoming Samtec product is made and performs. Even though none of us at Think Ahead Studios are highly technical computer engineers, we were able to compose a 3D mapping of one of Samtec’s latest developments: the AcceleRateHD mezzanine strip.Creating 3D animations in 4K resolution can result in some massive files that require long rendering times — up to 5 days or more. This, combined with a pretty tight timeframe kept us on our toes throughout the project. As you can see, the final animation was a snazzy product overview that Samtec used to unveil the AcceleRateHD at a high profile industry trade show.Indianapolis Public Library Foundation – On the Road to ReadingAt Think Ahead Studios, we love to tell a great story. This TV PSA we created for the Indianapolis Library Foundation shows a classroom of children discovering a new world through books. Targeted at parents in Central Indiana, the video called for community support for Foundation programs like On the Road to Reading. For this piece, we wanted to capture a feeling of childhood imagination and show why reading is so important for sustaining it. We created an underwater classroom, complete with schools of fish, stingrays, and underwater plants. Checkout the breakdown to see how many layers we used to achieve the visual effect.As we put a wrap on 2017, we look forward to telling more stories like these. You can check out Think Ahead Studios’ full 2017 Animation & VFX Reel below.