Sustainability 101 @ Pratt & Whitney Canada

Project objective: to create a 10-minute animation video for employees in 4 languages (English, French, Polish & Chinese). The video should introduce the fundamentals of sustainability (based on science), how they relate to Pratt & Whitney Canada’s 2028 sustainability vision and what the company is already doing to meet its sustainability goals.

Pratt & Whitney Canada: Every second, a Pratt & Whitney Canada (P&WC) powered aircraft takes off or lands somewhere in the world. They power the largest fleet of business and regional aircraft and helicopters – more than 50,000 engines in service in over 200 countries.

How we did it: Pratt & Whitney Canada decided to build on the two existing videos “Sustainability: a scientific definition” and the “4 root causes of unsustainability” (available for free on YouTube) and to add after that, a section on how the 4 root causes relate to P&WC’s sustainability challenges and 2028 sustainability vision. So I merged the two existing videos into one while P&WC was writing a new script for the customized part. Once the script was approved, I drew the illustrations and after a few back and forth on the drawings, the illustrations were approved. As usual, I recorded the drawing by drawing on my screen with Photoshop while recording the screen as a movie (using Screen Record Pro from the AppStore). Movie editing and synchronization was done with Final Cut Pro X.

Once the English video was finalized and approved, P&WC translated the narration and on-screen illustrations of the video into French, Polish and Chinese and sent me the on-screen texts to create the videos in those three languages. Translation of on-screen texts was done with Motion 5. The new segment of the video was designed so that on-screen texts could be easily translated directly in Final Cut Pro X. Synchronization of drawings and voice over in Chinese was a bit of an adventure since I don’t speak a word of Chinese but breaking down the audio files in 30-second chunks made it possible for me to do it by comparing the files with the English and French ones.

P&WC has also created a guidebook using the illustrations from the video to improve the in person training experience with employees.

The Chinese and Polish translations of the existing videos are available to all for free on my YouTube channel “Sustainability Illustrated“.

See Scott Hendershot’s testimonial here (project manager for P&WC on this project).

• Client work