Amazon

Amazon Stories is a series about the company and the people who work there. Malka Media and Amazon brought Therum in to build what sits on top of the footage: the lower thirds that name a speaker, the title cards that open a cut, and the motion graphics that carry it.

A series is not one film. Whatever we made had to survive being rebuilt for the next episode, and the one after that, by someone who was not in the room when it was designed.

Therum's work for Amazon was sporadic, short projects of a couple of months at a time across the years it ran, and all of it was digital media: the lower third work with Malka Media, and other work through Amazon's contractor arrangement. Therum owned the graphics package on Amazon Stories. Malka Media and Amazon ran the programme; what we handed over was the opener, the transition graphics between scenes, the end card and the family of lower thirds that hold a name and a title, plus art direction for infographics, quotes, news clippings and abstract factory shots.

Amazon Stories runs on many interviews, so the graphics had to work before anyone knew who would be on camera. We designed the lower third as a container: a name line with a title and business unit line under it, and the plate itself offered as a dark bar, a white box with a rule, an amber pill or plain type straight over the picture. The opener works the same way, in a light and a dark version, so it sits on any footage.

We delivered the Amazon smile mark animating into the words every day better, in a white version and a dark version, with the mark set above the line and beside it. The lower thirds came as a family of treatments over the same interview frame, each holding a name and a title with business unit. A further sequence of title cards, split screen frames and type led transitions came with them. Everything was presented in on screen mockups.

The work went out as the title and lower third package for Amazon Stories, the series looking inside the company and the people who work there, made with Malka Media. Light and dark versions of the opener shipped together, and the lower thirds shipped as a set of treatments rather than one locked design, so a cut could take the plate that suited the footage it was sitting on.

We designed for footage nobody had shot yet, so the package gave each cut a choice rather than a rule. Graphics built as a system keep fitting whatever the next interview brings.