Case File 006 — Animation & Pitch Video

Umami

An animated restaurant concept that lets customers build their own sushi, ingredient by ingredient — pitched as a fully animated roadshow video instead of a slide deck.

Role: Designed, Animator & Video Editor
Timeline: Summer 2022
Team: 8-person business team; 2-person animation team
Context: Model Entrepreneur Competition (MEC)
Tools: Procreate, CapCut

Watch the Full Video ↗

01 — Overview

About the project

Umami is a customizable sushi restaurant concept developed for the Model Entrepreneur Competition by an eight-person business team. While the group collaborated on the broader business proposal, another teammate and I created the animated pitch video presented here.

Instead of choosing only from a fixed menu, customers could select the ingredients inside their sushi and experiment with new or unexpected combinations.

Efficiency FAST, LOW-FRICTION ORDERING

Health CLEAR, CUSTOMIZABLE INGREDIENTS

Affordability ACCESSIBLE PRICING

The goal was to make sushi ordering more flexible while keeping the experience quick, accessible, and easy to understand.

02 — Choosing Animation Over Slides

Choosing animation over slides

When our team reviewed roadshow videos from previous MEC competitions, many relied on traditional presentation slides. While slides were easier to produce, they often felt repetitive and difficult to remember.

I proposed presenting Umami through animation instead.

At first, some team members were hesitant because only two of us had animation experience. To make the direction more concrete, I created visual demos and helped develop a storyboard showing how the restaurant concept could unfold through a customer's ordering journey.

Hand-drawn iPad storyboard panels sketching the Umami ordering journey — a busy customer skipping breakfast, a doorbell ring, an app order, and a customizable sushi tray with the words healthy, customizable, and fast — The early storyboard: sketching the customer's journey from a skipped breakfast to a doorbell ring to a fully customizable tray of sushi.

Once the team saw how the scenes could connect, we decided to build the pitch as a fully animated video rather than a conventional slide presentation.

03 — Building the Video

Building the video

The animation was created frame by frame in Procreate and edited in CapCut. Our process included:

Storyboarding the ordering journey
Designing the restaurant, ingredients, and interface
Drawing multiple versions of each scene
Testing transitions and pacing
Removing scenes that slowed down the explanation
Adjusting animation speed
Adding music and sound effects
Editing the scenes into one final roadshow video

Early logo exploration: sushi rolls, a flower mark, and wordmark variations before landing on the final identity.

Hand-drawn app interface mockup showing an order screen with Sushi Roll and Dango customization options — Interface mockup — the order screen where customers pick a base before customizing.

Hand-drawn app interface mockup showing the sushi roll customization screen with rice, seasoning, meat, fish, and vegetable options — Interface mockup — the customization screen, letting customers build their roll ingredient by ingredient.

Procreate gallery grid of the Umami animation frames — a cutting board with salmon, a sink filling a bowl with water, a customer walking and picking up a package, the black-and-white Umami storefront awning, and a phone ordering screen — The Procreate gallery: every scene drawn frame by frame, from the storefront awning to the customer's walk to the door.

Not every idea made it into the final version. Some scenes were simplified or removed to keep the explanation focused and maintain the pace of the pitch.

The final video showed how a customer could select ingredients, create a personalized sushi order, and receive it quickly and efficiently.

04 — Reflection

Reflection

The strongest part of Umami was the decision to communicate the concept through animation rather than a conventional pitch deck.

The process required more time, but it allowed us to demonstrate the service instead of only describing it. Movement, sequencing, and sound made the ordering system easier to understand and gave the business proposal a more distinctive visual identity.

The project also showed me the value of prototyping an idea before asking a team to commit to it. The early animation tests and storyboard helped turn an unfamiliar approach into something the group could evaluate and support.

🏆 BEST ROADSHOW VIDEO AWARD

4th OF MORE THAN 80 COMPETING TEAMS

Looking back, I am still proud that we followed through on the more ambitious direction. Umami became not only a restaurant proposal, but also an early experiment in using visual storytelling to make a business idea feel immediate and memorable.