The world is but a canvas to the imagination.

This is a cool little project we put together over Christmas and into the New Year, during some down-time. Inspired by the experience of long lockdowns and the move to a working-from-home environment, that has transformed our studio, our mindset and has spread across the world. After a year of hard work, we wanted to make something quick and fun to refresh ourselves for the new year.

Get Out There! – An important message.

Our team loves to create quirky 2D stuff so we thought of something that could be achievable relatively quickly during some rare downtime.

We limited ourselves to 3 key scenes that could be easily created, but would still look great, and had the thought mentality of a short ‘ident’ style animation. Originally thinking around 15-20 seconds even though we ended up closer to 30.

Our storyboard was made up of words and a few reference images and mood boards. We created a variety of simple sketches for 3 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.

Creative Director – Callan Woolcock
Illustration / Artwork – Jennifer Cheng, Erin Flatters Jeric Ilagan
AE Animation – Tracey Thesira, Jeric Ilagan, Jennifer Cheng, Erin Flatters, James Manton, Malek Baloochi, Callan Woolcock
Frame-by-Frame – Jeric Ilagan
3D Animation - Malek Baloochi
Music & Audio - Sean Crowley