Holman- Be The Sun, Not The Salt

An animated popup storybook

Design, graphics, animation

We all strive to be better in one way or another, but change from within can be a rocky road to navigate alone. The book Be The Sun, Not The Salt, by executive leadership expert Harry Cohen aims to help readers with this – so that each and every person can be the best person they can be.

This mission applies to all of us, and can impact us each and every day – which is why the executive team at Holman thought it important to bring Harry’s message to its entire workforce. From the president to the cleaning crew, every Holman employee was gifted their own copy of Be The Sun, Not The Salt to try and enact global organizational change from the ground up.

Due to the scale of this initiative Holman needed help getting the word out. It’s no good to simply send a book to thousands of employees if there is no context, which is what we, in partnership with agency Avenue Red, we’re tasked with producing.

The book, Be The Sun, Not The Salt, takes a simple and straightforward approach at guiding the reader with easy to recognize visuals and easy to understand metaphors – so it made sense to employ an easily recognizable and enormously fun visual device to support the story – the popup book.

Each scene was designed as a series of 2D graphics, playing up the cut paper aesthetic, but composed in 3D space, akin to a physical popup book. Our video hosts, Harry (author) and Mindy (Holman), were shot in-studio as a series of still images that were processed and integrated into the scenes, mimicking a choppy stop motion effect. The scenes were then composited into a custom 3D book rig, built in Cinema4D, that allowed for realistic page turns, and provided the base for each scene to populate within. VO and music were added, along with some post and finishing magic to tie all the elements together.

The result was a nice, quirky promotional video for the book which was used by Holman to communicate their “Be The Sun, Not The Salt” initiative, as well as by the book’s publisher to promote its release.