In fall 2019, Quartz released a Gracie Award-winning opioids documentary: a sprawling, international look at how Purdue pharmaceuticals have marketed opioids in the U.S., and how they’re currently using the same tactics to market them abroad under Mundipharma. My team traveled to France, the Netherlands, and Pakistan to report this story, talking to black market pharmaceutical dealers, doctors, and drug reps.
I was in charge of post production while juggling art direction of two other video series. In this documentary, I was responsible for art direction, animation and finishing edits.
Organization and Tone
The goal of this investigation was to create something that was about opioids but…funny. We didn’t want to make another crushingly depressing documentary and were going for tongue and cheek. It was a difficult balance that we achieved with high contrast footage that emphasized shadows, contrasted with bright, almost cutesy graphics. We added a voice actor that served as the main character of the documentary and had him narrate as if he was an opioid marketer. We told him to come in with a “used car salesman” suit, and we shot stills of him in the studio. From there, I chose selects and then used Photoshop to turn his brown suit lavender, putting him on a bright blue background to give a late-night-infomercial feel.
After Charles’ styling was decided, I moved onto organization. I created a 1000+ cell spreadsheet that included thumbnails of the graphics, checks for completion and fact checking, and notes on changes. It became our post production bible that we used to create daily schedules and estimate final delivery. Because of the check marks and color coding it was immediately apparent what needed to get done at a glance, and keep track of any changes.
Animation
My proudest creation from this project is my pill monster. It represents the workings of the pharmaceutical industry and how drug reps, insurance companies, doctors and the black market work in tandem to create this demand for new drugs. My interpretation of the “pharmaceutical machine” was personifying steampunk gears, money, pills and syringes into a scuttling monster that travels across the globe. I wanted it to be a slightly more sinister Howl’s moving castle, but also have an inherent element of absurdity.
Documents
Half of this story is told through legal proceedings, so I had to figure out a way to make documents interesting. Most of these documents were not high resolution, so I ended up using a mixture of roughen edges and an alpha texture on top of a masked paper background to bring text up word-by-word and give the animation dynamism.
I always used a crumpled paper texture to give documents a bit more visual interest and did a lot of layering so it wasn’t just the title page of the document, but some of the contents.
