Law and order.

Agencies need a way to catch up with their caseloads, and not let crime get too far ahead of them. That’s where Cellebrite comes in. Cellebrite aimed to raise awareness of its Pathfinder product among its audience. But this task isn’t as simple as it sounds. Pathfinder works in complex ways—it turns data from different sources, like devices, into insights that help law enforcement make sense of digital evidence, establishing patterns and connections across any case.

Testing the limits.

Our motion team’s first response to this project was “How much time do we have?” Cellebrite had never told a story in this way before, and their team tapped our studio with a challenge in mind—for us to show them exactly what we were made of. This opened a whole can of worms. Telling the solution story in an easy-to-understand way required a rethinking of Cellebrite’s visual language—our approach expanded on their brand, turning what could’ve just been icon-based animation into an extensive visual story.

We really had to dig deep. How exactly does one visually show a world of digital data (represented as cubes) being collected from physical evidence gathered from a crime scene, organized and sorted, thus leading to a series of clues that result in solving a case? Getting from sketch boards to end result was no small feat—it required tons of trial and error, technical exploration, testing, and troubleshooting. A lot of dividing and conquering. In other words, many little failures to get to the big wins.

Exhibit A.

We’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details of how we achieved this, but let’s take a look at Exhibit A of the Cellebrite Pathfinder animation breakdown: Tomas the animator. Tomas was a huge helping hand in coming up with a 3D solve that enabled us to fill any object with a matrix of cubes. This is how we transitioned from what we call the “Rubik’s cube on steroids” (representing organized digital evidence) to the “suspect” involved in the investigation. Tomas was also the mastermind behind the Rubik’s cube shuffle dance scenes. That alone took extensive technical prowess and brain juice that we don’t typically use in our day to day. And to put the workload in perspective, the scenes involving those cubes occupy a mere 18 seconds of the 1 minute and 30 seconds of animation we had to create in total.

So was this a big lift? Yes…yes it was. But we’re stoked on it. And we thank Cellebrite for the challenge.

Our feedback filter.

In order to achieve this huge task—our common goal—we were lucky to collaborate with a client that advocated and corralled constructive feedback for us throughout the process.