Upon posting by Anna Yeaman from Stylecampaign, I couldn’t resist on putting this in the spotlight. It’s a beautifully designed Disney Pixar promotion of Toy Story 3 dvd / Blu-ray including an animation as subtle trailer. Here’s the full email:
The reason I love this is that the animation itself is not too big in resolution or intrusive: it’s a true addition to the email and very well made. The file size is big though: no less than 2MB, which results in about 100kb/sec of data throughput. In modern broadband internet times that’s not a lot, but it will take some time for people who do not have access to that. The placement of the animation is excellent: just below the regular image header to the left, which will still fall in many peoples preview pane limits (as long as they download images, of course). Great stuff.
animation, disney, email design, toy story
Hey Remy, thanks for posting our work! The VideoGif was 2MB, we had a second version which was 1.5MB. We sent both along, so I’ll have to check to see which was deployed. You have to balance file size with image quality… The amount of camera motion, gradients, length – typically 15-20sec – and the quality of the source video all impact the results. Though quality is a limitation of this technique along with a small resolution we’ve nethertheless seen some fantastic results.
As I mentioned in the tweet, we’ve seen an increase in demand for VideoGifs lately (only took 2yrs!). Can’t believe its been that long since I wrote the Twilight post on using this technique. Anyway I’ll be writing some video in email posts myself in the next couple of months, as we still have a few tricks up our sleeve 🙂