A little passion project we put together over Christmas, inspired by the experience of finally attaining freedom after the long COVID lockdown. After a year of hard work, we wanted to make something quick and fun to refresh ourselves for the new year.
Our team loves to create quirky 2D animation so we thought of something that could be achievable relatively quickly during some rare downtime.
We limited ourselves to three key scenes that could be easily created, but would still look great, so a short ‘ident’ style animation seemed perfect.
Our storyboard was made up of words and a few reference images and mood boards. We created a variety of simple sketches for three key frames, which were then transformed polished style frames in Adobe Illustrator.
Originally intended to only be 2D and animated in AE, one of our 3D artists had a bit of spare time so we decided to add in an abstract transformation as our hero flies through the world for extra coolness. This was created and rendered in C4D, with simple environmental elements used to wipe the animation on and off.
We had originally planned for a beautifully coloured butterfly to fly into the hero’s room, inspiring her to leap out there, but decided to change this to a dragonfly because we felt it would animate better, and would work better with a face.
We did a quick frame-by-frame animation in Photoshop of the dragonfly at the start, to give him a little more bend and exaggerated motion – again something simple and easy but makes a lot of difference.
The final result was a beautiful piece of inspiring animation that we’re all proud of, and if we can find the time, we’re hoping to produce further little fun messages just like this every year.
