Traditional graphic facilitation (colloquially known as fast draws or quick draws) is commonly rooted in the style of cartooning because the nature of the medium requires you be loose and quick with your drawings whilst trying to keep up with spoken word. Nowadays, we just pre-record and speed up the footage to keep up with ideas. Cheating right? In someways yes, but it allows us to do some amazing things not possible with a live demo. After all, the goal is to capture and keep the audience engaged long enough to hear your message; and who doesn't love a good time-lapse?

As with all projects - It's best to start with some concept sketches to get a sense of what the project will feel like. Sometimes I'll just start by free drawing, and see where it takes me, then I'll spend a good chunk of time studying reference material and refining the look. In the case of corals, I really had no concept of what they really were. My initial thought was that they were sea plants that grew on rocks, I honestly had no idea how complex they were, or why they really mattered.

Understanding the importance of corals and how they fit into our ecosystem became a big part of how I wanted to craft the visual message, and after studying a bit I hit the artboards.

I had a rough script written by a NOAA coral scientists Peter Edwards and Alicia Clarke, but I had to solve some visual challenges that would be difficult to convey using traditional graphic facilitation. For example, one of the lines read,"Coral reefs pump billions of dollars into the U.S Economy." How do you draw that? Maybe...a bike pump with attached a map of the U.S? Then I thought WWCJD? (What would Chuck Jones do?) Which lead me to Duck Amuck, the classic Looney Toons episode where Daffy Duck is being tormented by an off camera animator(who turns out to be Bugs Bunny). That was my aha moment, my hand can interact with the drawings.

Here's a YouTube link of the video

To be continued...