SaaS Explainer – Among the Clouds

BetterCloud is a revolutionary (we realize that word is over-used, but in this case it’s totally accurate) SaaS that rounds up all the other SaaS’ so IT people can stop pulling out their hair and finally take control of the cloud.

The Challenge

You’d think when a product is that revolutionary, it’d be easy to make a killer video, but it’s not. Often times, the more fantastic the product, the more you really have to help your audience see a new world of possibilities. Additionally, we had the task of visualizing what the cloud looks like and how it can be organized.

The Approach

It may sound too obvious, but much of our inspiration came from the two words within the name itself – “better” and “cloud.” We knew that at some point we would need to show data structures that looked like clouds, but what does “better” look like? In the case of BetterCloud, “better” looks like organization. This left us with the visual challenge of what objects get organized, because we’re talking about intagible files, systems and user profiles. Through many iterations of the visual style, we landed on a metaphor that uses different platonic solid forms to loosely represent each type of data. Because we introduce each form with proper context, viewers will build associations for these abstract forms.

Concept Exploration

Design Language Development

Storyboard

The Execution

To visualize this cloud world, we needed a world with a high level of detail to show the sheer size of the datasets viewers are dealing with. We embraced this challenge by animating with cloners and particle systems in 3D. We chose to set this world in the sky as a nod to the cloud metaphor, and lit our simple scene with HDRIs. Octane quickly became the obvious choice for rendering this world, and we fell in love with the way frosted glass complimented the HDRI sky.

Most of the video is a continuous scene, and we needed to build a new portal-transition rig to get us from the dark, old world of on-premise data to the bright sky of the cloud.

The Message

Simply put, the best way to show people the future, is to show them where they’ve been. With that in mind, we told the story of SaaS and how it’s evolved over time, leaving BetterCloud as the hero that brings Saas to new heights.