Digital Cement was set to move our Toronto office from Liberty Village to Wellington and Yonge. We needed to let our friends and associates know that we were moving.

With our marketing hats firmly in place, we asked: what would the move and the new location say about us as a company? Or, rather, what did we want it to say? Obviously, we were moving on up, on to bigger and better things… We were moving from Liberty Village, in the wild west of Toronto, to the very core of the city, to the beating heart of the financial district.

We brainstormed various ways that we could position our new location. “But wait. Isn’t the journey just as as important as the destination?”, one lateral-thinker inquired. And that was it. We decided to send out a move notice describing not only our new location, but also the journey that got us there.

Small Steps

From our Liberty Village office to our new home in the East End it was pretty much a straight shot across the city.

I holstered my trusty Canon SLR and began to walk, snapping photos at every fifth step. At the end of the day, I had thousands of shots with which to create a stop-motion impression of a journey.

A few Instagram filters later, with a renewed appreciation of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe After Effects, a video was ready. I’d even managed to composite cameo appearance of all of our major clients into the sequence.

“This is great”, our company president said. “But what should we do for our preferred clients? I’d like to send them something in the mail”.

And so it was that our patent-pending analogue video — otherwise known as a flip book — was born. On the finest paper stock, we printed a sequence of about two hundred stills. By flipping through the pages, all of the stop motion video magic came to life.

Moving Forward

The one remaining piece of the puzzle was to draft up an email that would drive to the video.

Not content to relax back into traditional thinking, we opted instead to continue pushing boundaries. And so, we ended up with an email that scrolled horizontally instead of vertically. The idea of a journey forward was reinforced. Pertinent details were communicated. Attention was grabbed. Our work was done.