Northern Beaches Council:
Bringing a Community to Life
Community communication animation
Art direction, storyboarding, illustration, animation. In collaboration with QC Video.
Northern Beaches Council needed to communicate a sensitive topic to their community in a way that felt honest, approachable, and genuinely human.
The brief called for animation that would feel local, familiar, and warm rather than corporate or clinical.
The Challenge
Northern Beaches Council needed to communicate a sensitive community topic in a way that felt honest and approachable rather than corporate. The brief called for a whiteboard-style animation, a familiar format, but one that risks feeling generic if handled without care. The video needed to feel like it belonged to the community watching it.
The Solution
Rather than following the whiteboard brief literally, I proposed an elevated approach: hand-drawn line illustrations with a reduced framerate, subtle line distortion, and a light line boil to give the animation an organic, handmade quality. The result sat somewhere between a simple line drawing and fully animated content, warm and tactile in a way that clean vector animation rarely achieves.
To ground the video in the local area, I hand-drew recognisable Northern Beaches landmarks, beaches, libraries, sports fields, and community spaces, so that residents would see their own suburb reflected back at them. A quick animation sample was enough to get the Council team immediately on board with the direction.
The Impact
The finished video carried the approachability of hand-drawn animation with a level of craft that lifted it well beyond a standard whiteboard explainer. On a YouTube channel where most videos sit under 100 views, this one reached over 1,400 - a strong signal that the warm, locally grounded approach connected with the community it was made for.
Delivered under a tight deadline, the project also extended to vertical social media formats, rebuilt from the ground up rather than simply cropped, so every version felt intentional.
Working to a tight deadline or a specific creative brief?
I'm experienced working under pressure without it showing in the work. If you've got a brief that needs a fast, thoughtful response, a discovery call is a good place to start.