| Informative Motion Graphics

Learn how to create and integrate motion graphics to educate and inform your audience with Yussef Cole.

This workshop is for filmmakers, editors, artists, digital content creators, and animators interested in using motion graphics to educate and inform an audience. Whether it’s in video podcasts, branded content, in explainer videos for news sites like Vox, The Atlantic, or The New York Times; in the graphic interstitials of documentary films, or as part of the background presentation of shows like Last Week Tonight or The Daily Show, motion graphics is a vital tool for communicating complicated ideas and information.

Instructor Yussef Cole’s 2023 showreel ‘Heart of Cole’.
Through lectures, case studies and in-class exercises students will learn how to use design, animation, images, and writing to create work that is visually exciting, informative and concise; work that can cut through the sheer amount of noise and distraction inundating viewers every day.

Beyond developing an understanding of the dos and don’ts of representing data honestly, students will learn how to read and understand script notes that call for graphics, how to storyboard their visual concepts using rough pencil sketches, and finally, how to use those storyboards as the basis for stunning infographic animations. 

Video showcasing Facebook’s marketplace features, by Yussef Cole.

Instructor Yussef Cole directed and animated the show open for the 19th Annual Webby Awards.

Being able to work comfortably in Adobe After Effects, Premiere, and either Photoshop or Illustrator is necessary. Students can elect to bring in their own infographic concepts or generate new ones during the first part of the workshop. Students may work individually or in small groups.

By the end of the workshop, students will have storyboarded, animated, and exported a short explainer video which we will all review together and discuss at the end of the week.

Header image taken from the Patriot Act, a weekly Netflix comedy news show with Hasahn Minhaj, for which Yussef directed graphics for. The show won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Design.