Pencil Park impresses with interactive proposals

Pencil Park is a Paris-based creative agency proving that corporate communications don’t have to be boring. Since 2012, founder Fédéric Berria and his team have blended film production, motion graphics, and gamified solutions to create interactive work for their healthcare and MedTech clients.

So how does a small, agile agency consistently outshine bigger competition? According to Fédéric, the secret is Rive.

“We win proposals because we stand out early,” Fédéric explains. “Rive lets us involve clients right from the start. We can quickly create interactive demos or project examples that help clients imagine the final result before signing.” 

Here’s how Pencil Park created a winning proposal and delivered a crowd-pleasing campaign for one of the world’s largest healthcare companies. 

The problem: Static pitches

Before Rive, Pencil Park’s pitches had the same problem as most agencies: they didn’t stand out.

Here’s why:

• Static PDFs lacked the interactivity to show off Pencil Park’s vision. 

• Heavy video files slowed down performance and failed to impress on mobile.

• Old workflows made quick updates impossible, limiting their ability to iterate based on client feedback. 

  
  

  

The pitch: Selling their vision with interactivity

Becton Dickinson (BD), one of the world’s oldest and largest medical companies with over 70,000 employees, invited Pencil Park and three other agencies to pitch a project for the healthcare conference EUSEM Congress 2024. The brief — if they chose to accept it — was to pitch a quiz experience for medical professionals, one that attracted booth visitors and captured sales leads. 

While their competitors pitched static PDFs, Pencil Park built something better — an interactive quiz you could actually play. 

To get it done, Fédéric turned to Rive, a creative tool that lets designers build production-ready graphics at runtime. Fédéric describes Rive as the key to delivering fast, flexible, and engaging proposals that leave competitors behind. 

He calls the Rive State Machine “the pillar of Rive,” and for good reason. It’s the brain behind Pencil Park’s dynamic demos. It controls animations that respond instantly to user input, whether it’s tapping, swiping, or switching devices. It’s interactivity without the lag. 

Using Rive, the team created a fully interactive demo hosted online, complete with sound and gameplay logic. BD could test the quiz directly from an iPad and watch animations respond to inputs in real-time. Instead of watching a demo, clients were playing. 

“We can spin up interactive demos and animations that feel alive,” says Fédéric. “Clients see it and say, ‘We want that.’ It’s an emotional reaction.”

“My kid played this and loved it,” Fédéric recalls hearing from BD. “We won the project on the spot.”

The process: From concept to interactive demo

After winning the pitch, Pencil Park worked closely with BD to develop the concept and fine-tune the visuals to hit BD’s brand notes.

They began by designing vector-based graphics in Adobe Illustrator. These assets were imported into Rive, where the team layered animations using the State Machine. 

To ensure performance, the team used PHP and JavaScript to sync gameplay data with the visuals. Animations adapted to different devices without requiring duplicate design work. Rive’s nested artboards let Pencil Park test layouts and scale assets to fit multiple screen sizes, all without rebuilding animations from scratch.

Fédéric emphasizes how Rive’s flexibility saved time and effort. “We built the core animations once, then reused them across devices. It was faster, cheaper, and looked better.”

The results: A hit at the EUSEM Congress 

Pencil Park’s game turned BD’s booth into the life of the party. Visitors lined up on iPads to test their skills, competing for high scores on a dynamic leaderboard. The project exceeded engagement goals and earned rave reviews.

Behind the scenes, Rive let Pencil Park adapt the game to multiple languages, devices, and screens, giving BD a consistent, polished experience — whether viewed on an iPad or a big-screen leaderboard. Meanwhile, the State Machine synced animations with user inputs, keeping gameplay smooth and responsive. 

The impact: A streak of wins

The impact didn’t end at the event. Within BD, the project cemented Pencil Park’s reputation as an innovative partner, leading to more work across divisions.

“Using Rive for this project proved we could pitch bigger, deliver faster, and keep costs low without cutting corners,” says Fédéric. “I’m profoundly satisfied with this growth strategy and hope to do the same for other corporate clients.” 

Since that first pitch, Pencil Park has closed 100% of their deals — five out of five — using Rive.

Ready to ditch static pitches? Fire up Rive, build something interactive, and watch clients say, “We want that.”

Helena Swahn is a writer based in London, UK.