The idea for Capsule CEO was spawned out of the years Anthem has spent developing websites and apps for large companies, and the hundreds of encounters with dozens of company representatives and business owners we experienced in doing so.  It was common to feel that they were speaking in code; all the words were big and impressive, and pleasant-sounding, but also confusing, almost like a secret language.  The people who spoke this language always talked to you in the friendliest way, like they assumed you would understand exactly what they meant, and that these words would help you answer some impossible-to-solve question.  In beginning the design process for Capsule CEO, this sunny helpfulness was the most important thing to capture.  Capsule CEO speaks in nonsense, but he does it with the sole intention of providing clarity.

It was also important that he be short.

With these thoughts regarding his personality in mind, the process of determining his look was begun.  First of all, Capsule CEO would not be young.  He was not an upstart, eager to prove himself.  He was established, experienced, self-assured; these indecipherable nuggets of wisdom he would be offering you would be the same golden principles that had rocketed him to the top of the corporate ladder.  To illustrate this, a silver streak was added to his hair; his slightly unkempt hair and wide-eyed, clear smile would project a casual but together attitude.  His jacket was left hanging open, and his shoes made loafers instead of the typical polished, gleaming wingtips.  The majority of our time was then spent finding exactly the right facial expression to make Capsule CEO seem personable, trustworthy, and slightly unhinged.  Here’s a full page of concept work by character designer Darius Scott Hill:

Around the bottom right corner there is where his character really began to shine through.  His eyes seem warm, reflecting hope and excitement at the prospect of the continual new adventures finance brings his way.  Business is a sport for him, and his face reflects the wholesome craving for the prize at the end of game well played.

Darius took the previous design, simplified it, cleaned it up, and posed him so that his body language shouted “Have I got an idea for you!  This time, we’re really gonna knock ‘em dead!”

Capsule CEO was initially dressed in a dark gray sweater.  It fit his personality, but said “motivational speaker” more than “business maverick”,  so an unbuttoned dress shirt was substituted.  The app’s programmer, Dan Sandland, added a sunny, bright background to the design to amplify Capsule CEO’s radiant enthusiasm.  Now that the CEO himself was complete, the task of filling his tiny virtual mind with words of pure genius was put upon Anthem’s programming team.

We scoured our contracts and proposals for every vague, obfuscating piece of legal jargon we could find.  We pored through speeches, press releases, interviews, and blog posts by the most luminary figures of the business community.  We nearly wore out our thesauruses and dictionaries seeking out every last scrap of arcane boilerplate to plug into our tiny tycoon’s database of entrepreneurial excellence.  Once it was all there, magic took care of the rest.

So don’t let our efforts go to waste!  Capsule CEO exists to strategize dynamic new approaches for maximizing YOUR profit influx!  New business owner? Fledgling entrepreneur? Not sure what your first steps should be in this confusing world of high risk and high finance? Need someone to help you economize your commercial paradigm perception management?
Don’t spend another minute waiting for success to find YOU… let Capsule CEO help you achieve your ultimate transactional potential today!

Ha ha ha ha!  Indeed!

To get the app.

Check out the website: http://capsuleceo.com/

Step 1:
Hire an eclectic and talented group of designers, programmers, artists, animators, and other miscellaneous geniuses. Cram them all into one (1) large passenger van.
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Step 2:
Drive said van to Chattanooga, TN. Park van outside the illustrious and ever-expanding Chattanooga Zoo. Enter gift shop. Provide one (1) large stipend for purchase of multiple plush camels. Advance from gift shop into zoo.

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TIP: Be aware of the availiability of lavatories and avoid embarrassing situations.
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On to the living attractions!

Step 3.1: Commune with primates.

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Step 3.2: Draw deep inspriation from the warmth and compassion of goats.
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The Chattanooga Zoo has the world’s largest indoor Red Panda exhibit. Where are the pandas??

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Step 3.3: Look at Red Panda.

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Good job!!
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Sometimes you have to travel far from home to appreciate what you already have. Luckily, signs exist just to point these things out.
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Okay, you can go now.

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Step 4: Go to the muthaflippin’ Tennessee Aquarium.

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Step 5: Look at fish there.

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NOTE: Sea creatures can be incredibly depressing. Don’t let them bum you out.
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These aquatic agitators can also be very frustrating. Retain your composure; don’t get dragged down to their level.
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Some water-dwelling animals have evolved the remarkable ability to sprout wings and fly freely. The Tennessee Aquarium is one of the only North American facilities fortunate enough to have a varied congregation of these amazing achievements of natural selection. A visit there is indeed a unique opportunity to scrutinize them closely.

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Okay, you can go now.

NOTE: Prolonged exposure to undersea conditions may prove confusing for your charges. Remind them that though they may feel waterlogged, topside they do remain.
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Step 6:

Leave Tennessee! Georgia patiently awaits, and there with it, the comforts of Dr. Pepper, Cheez-Its, and the unceasing, endlessly brutal cyclopian gaze of your computer monitor. Satisfying though they may be, fish are fleeting. Home and true design glory await, and you can tarry no longer. Onward, ever onward, like a shark.

Avanti, brave warriors!

Paperdoll, after bringing down the house yet again.

We think this makes it a better time than ever to revisit our own version of the video, and the design process behind it.

Starting the project, our most important consideration was Time. PaperDoll had fortuitously found themselves with the opportunity to get the song nationwide exposure as part of a DayQuil commercial that would air on major cable outlets, including Comedy Central and Spike. The ad had a set date for its premiere airing, and thusly our deadline also fell near that date. We had previously done a fully animated video for the band’s song “Anything At All,” but the time crunch imposed on this project made doing another animated piece unfeasible; Our solution was to follow in the footsteps of one of the most monstrously important and influential of all music video pioneers: The Strokes.

Though there is some performance footage of the band present in the video, the bulk of it is stitched together from vintage TV and movie clips, documentary films, commercials, and other visual ephemera. Enough correlation exists between the video’s images to maintain some sort of forward momentum, but the thematic vagueness of the flow of images allows the song’s energy and texture to remain the focal point. Especially for a song whose title and lyrics express confusion and immobility, the barrage of mood-buoying pictures more than anything else accentuate the personality of the song, without being distracting. Their technique seemed an inspired solution for our spur-of-the-moment assignment. By using copyright-free material produced by third parties, we would save ourselves the time needed to generate original assets (time we simply did not have), without sacrificing our ability to provide an effective video foil to PaperDoll’s song.

Our first step was to decide on an approach. The major connective tie between The Strokes’ song and its video was the parallel between the song title (“Hard To Explain”, as also heard in the song’s chorus) and the capricious, searching dynamism of the video’s imagery. Thanks to careful and expressive lyrics, PaperDoll’s song had a much more cohesive theme than The Strokes’, but it was unlikely we’d be able to create an equally coherent visual counterpart quickly enough. So a more general relationship to the song would have to be found. Our song was entitled “If Nothing Happened.” Much of our source material would be from vintage sci-fi and horror flicks, with lots of drama, explosions, and overwrought faces bearing extreme expressions; in broader terms, lots of Things Happening. Perfect!

Thanks to Mill Creek’s mammoth public-domain movie box sets, we already had hundreds of hours of available footage at our disposal. Cheap cartoons, japanese monster movies, weird commericals, and silents were sifted through for their most exciting seconds, which were then sheared off and sewn into the fabric of our moving collage. For movie buffs like us, getting to massage snippets of familiar schlock staples like Creature From the Haunted Sea and The Revenge of Dr. X into a framework that supported PaperDoll’s great song was an uncommonly pleasurable task.

Only about a weekend was spent corralling workable bits of film from DVD onto our desktops. Darius Hill, veteran Anthem animator, handled directorial duties, exercising his nearly superhuman understanding of the laws of film to re-edit the hours of unrelated, scruffy, obscure video into an actual statement that both we and PaperDoll could be proud of. Timing had to be worked out; clips were synced up to the words of the song via labyrinthine, arcane correlations between the two (Metropolis‘ Rotwang the Inventor indignant intonation that he’s made a robot that never makes mistakes occurs as PaperDoll audibly explains “Everybody makes mistakes”; and later, one of Gumby’s robotic domestics goes haywire, wreaking prophesied havoc on his neighborhood.) Shots were carefully organized to draw the viewer’s eye from one edge of the screen to the other and back again, leading you into the next shot with natural ease.

From inception of the project to delivery, Darius and his team completed the project within one week. Inspiration joined forces with hard work, passion for cinema, love of pop culture, and love of pop music, to hurriedly produce a suitable counterpoint to an expertly crafted tune. The result:

Let’s do it again sometime!