Newsletter number two! This one is all about rescues – focusing on what they are, their missions and purposes, different types, and funding. 

Here are some questions that helped me to gather the corresponding research:

What are rescues? What do rescues do? What kind of animals can you adopt from rescues? What are their processes? How do they find the animals to rescue? How do they care for the animals? How do they make money? 

From these questions, I pulled together the outline for this newsletter.

Outline

Just like with the first newsletter about adoption, I created a detailed outline to follow for each animated page. 

1. What is an animal rescue? 
   • This section is all about the rescue mission and process. 

2. Rescue mission & process continued 
   • This section is focusing on fostering

3. Types of rescues
   • Types – breed or age-specific

4. Funding & care
   • Where do they get their money?
   • What type of care they provide to the animals

5. Conclusion

The answers to any of the questions in the introduction require a bit more information than simply one sentence. From this outline and the research I’d gathered, I found that this newsletter would be a bit more text-heavy than the first one. This is totally fine – each newsletter should provide the best information for what the topic is. The question then for me, was how I’d lay it out so it doesn’t look overwhelming with type. 

Production

Since I created a layout last week for the first newsletter, I was able to start from that for the second one. Again, using Illustrator, I entered all of the written content, re-arranged, and re-wrote as needed. During pre-production, I created a storyboard to follow for the animation plan, however, given this newsletter was a bit more substantial in text than the first newsletter, I had to adjust how everything animates. 

I also had to lay out the text in a way that doesn’t look overwhelming, which required a bit more thinking on my part. This is another reason why I love that the newsletters are animated – so each page doesn’t look like too much, and the information can still be easily legible with a steady pace between transitions. 

Here is the detailed animation plan for this page in particular:

“Ladapaw Letters” animates from the top into the center top, “what is an animal rescue?” information starts to follow in afterwards. The bunny begins to walk in at the same time, from the right. Once each piece of information animates in, the references fade down. They fade away before the “what is an animal rescue?” and all else animates out to the right, including the bunny, returning where it came from.

The next step was to bring the finished illustrator layers into After Effects to animate the text and graphics just like last week’s first newsletter. It’s nice that this is the second time I’ve done this now for the newsletter, as it felt like animating went a bit more smoothly. While it was still very time-consuming and challenges presented themselves along the way, I think each time will prove to move along better than the time before. 

Once again, I’m leaving the GIF export and setting it up in MailChimp for a little bit later so that I can look back and see if I want to make any improvements along the way. Hopefully, my fresh mind will be able to identify anything that might make it that much better for the audience. 

I’m really happy with the information I was able to present in this newsletter, and looking forward to developing the third one!