The Education Development Center needed a way to introduce The Engage Toolkit to prospective implementation partners around the world. The toolkit is an international framework for measuring and improving interaction between children and their caregivers and educators.

The problem was translational. the organization needed a way to make the toolkit’s methodology instantly legible to partners who had never seen it in action. I stepped in as motion designer, collaborating  alongside two communication strategists and a print designer. The project had a hard deadline tied to a grant requirement, with no room to slip.

The Process

I treated this project as a collaborative production pipeline because most of the stakeholders had never worked on a motion design project before. I broke the process into visible, approvable stages so the client always knew where we stood and could weigh in early, when changes were easier to make:

Script alignment first. I worked with the strategist to define word-count targets and the key narrative beats so the script would already fit the format.

Low-fidelity storyboards I mapped every beat of the voiceover to a visual intention, giving the client something concrete to react to long before any animation existed.

Voice casting as a design decision. I sourced multiple voice actor options and directed the final actor's pacing and cadence to match the visual rhythm we'd already established.

Midway through, I identified a gap: we were relying on pictograms because there wasn't much usable footage of ENGAGE being implemented internationally. Rather than accept that constraint, I pushed the client to source real footage from their implementation partners. That footage strengthened the second and third videos by showing the real value of the toolkit being implemented around the world.