Scaling product education is less about speed and more about animation system design. Here’s how we helped Meta produce nearly 40 creator education videos on a tight timeline.
One of the most common, and daunting, client demands we see is to deliver a huge amount of content on a really tight schedule.
The ask from Meta was just that - make almost 40 videos, teaching people about the Facebook Professional Dashboard for creators, in a little under 2 months. Oh, and come up with a non-descript UI design system so that the illustrations are evergreen.
A lot of companies might not be able to handle that tight of a turnaround, while also creating original illustrations and creative direction. But since we scale really well at The Booth, this was a task we were built to succeed at.
The key is to always be moving, with a focus on cascading effects of constantly working on the next thing, while a crack shot team is tidying up behind you. This way there’s always some momentum, and the forward progress makes everything behind it much faster, easier, and more efficient to assemble.
For example, while the storyboard artists clean up and finish the existing scripts, there’s people working on final illustrations. As soon as that's finished, we have someone move into animation prep and animation, while our team all catch up and walk along the foundation that has been laid, bringing everything into completion.
After a few days it turns into a well oiled machine, ready to continuously pump out content and deliver it to the client.
Let’s really dig in and get more specific about each step along the way through pre-production, production, and onto delivery.
After landing the project, and while we were setting up the production management system, we immediately started with look dev - remember always working one step ahead in the process? Well, that started right away.
Our first goal with any project is to provide absolute clarity for our clients and everyone on the team. In this case, that meant laying the groundwork for the creative team by setting up our workflow template in Milanote.
If you haven’t used it before, get on it. It’s one of the best tools we have at our disposal for production management.
Setting up project trackers? Easily done.
Need a way to share workflow basics, task lists, design guidelines and lookbooks with your team? No problem.
Customizable and easy to share, with no need for signups or additional accounts? Milanote has that covered too.
We use Milanote on every project that comes through The Booth. It’s really become our central hub for everything from creative project tracking, to onboarding new animators, to seeing at a glance what notes need to be addressed for a video we’re working on.
With almost 40 videos in motion, the creative workflow was only one part of the challenge. We also needed a simple way for the client team to understand what was happening, what needed feedback, and what had already been approved.
To manage that, we created a shared tracker called “Tracking ProDash Videos.” Each video had its own row with the deliverable name, approval status, final links for each format, and links to the outline, script, and storyboard. We also included the content section ID and subsection title so we could map out where each animation stood in the larger pool of e-learning videos.
At the end of each day, we sent Meta a clear status summary. That update showed which videos were in script, storyboard, animation, legal review, final approval, or delivery. This gave the client a simple way to see progress, flag issues, and keep feedback moving without slowing down the entire production.
That client-facing system was just as important as the animation workflow. It helped us keep momentum, reduce confusion, and make sure approvals were happening alongside production instead of becoming a bottleneck at the end.
With production management largely handled and set up inside Milanote and our shared client progress tracker in place, it was time to get into the trenches and start battling our way through the creative process.
We had a team of four illustrators and storyboard artists. To make the best use of our time we took an approach that saw us building a library of assets from an initial set of storyboards we created.
After those initial boards were done, we split our team and began creating the finished designs immediately. That meant that while the boards were being worked on, we were also coming up with finished designs and creating that same library to pull from.
And while that was happening, our team began to set up the project files and get the animators prepped for bringing everything to life. That meant recording scratch tracks for narration, and putting together animatics. We did this on an a-la-carte basis – as soon as a storyboard was fully designed, we would set up the project and get it ready for animation.
When it came to animation, we took the same approach as we did with illustration and storyboarding – start with an initial set, and build up a library.
We had this awesome library built up from the illustrations, the project files all ready to go, and the animators pumping out work.
As they built out their work and added it to a primary project file that was read by Animation Composer, we were able to utilize work that everyone was creating and blast through videos on a one or two-day schedule.
Phew. That's a lot of spinning plates to be balancing at the same time. But our team delivered.
The final product and its formatting is always front and center in our process. In this particular case, with 16x9 and 4x5 as the final delivery ratios, we needed to pay attention to where things were landing inside the frame so we didn’t have to make specific versions for each ratio. That would have added a huge amount of time that we simply didn’t have. So we made sure to account for that in the project file setup, and it worked like a dream.
Delivery was not just about exporting files. Before anything was sent to the client, each video moved through an internal review process with our lead animator, creative director, and producer. That gave us a final quality control pass across animation, creative direction, formatting, audio quality, script accuracy and overall consistency before the work was approved for delivery.
The tracking document also evolved as the project moved toward completion. What started as a production tracker became a final delivery map. Each topic and subtopic was organized with links to the final video assets in both aspect ratios, giving the client one clear place to find, review, and distribute every finished video.
It meant the final handoff was not just a folder full of exports. It was a structured system the client could use after launch.
It was a massive project to undertake, but the reason it worked was not just speed. It was the system behind the speed. By planning for scale from the beginning, we were able to keep production moving, maintain quality control, and give the client a clear path from kickoff to final delivery.
If you are planning a video project and want to understand what needs to happen before production starts, The Marketer’s Video Playbook walks through the decisions that make video projects easier to approve, produce, and launch.
