Have you heard about Climate Change?
Client: Earth Warriors, National Geographic
Brief: Create a fun and engaging animation for 4 – 10 year olds explaining the many issues caused by global warming and how we can do our part to help save the planet.
The video must be no longer then three minutes and must include the ‘Earth Warriors’, three mascots representing air, land and sea which currently feature on the Earth Warriors site and EW educational material.
The most challenging part of this project was creating the Earth Warriors, the heroes of the animation who want to encourage audiences young and old to help save the world.
We already had some illustrations from a previous creative however they were not exactly animation friendly. I considered for a while how to create an animation using these with limited movement. I also proposed recreating them as fully rigged characters in my own style using the essence of these illustrations and thankfully, the client was on-board.
My illustration style is very geometric and if you look at my other projects you will see a lot of simple shapes being used to create objects, scenes, backgrounds and characters. The new ‘animation friendly’ Earth Warriors took me a little while to get to where they are now. they kept feeling a bit too geometric and lacked a sense of charm. By accident (literally a slip of the mouse) I gave one of them a round belly and boom! Three childlike, chubby little Earth Warriors with podgy bellies, cute little outfits and an animation friendly design came into being.
Once these existed, creating the rest of the objects, animals, background and scenes was relatively straight forward.
Styleframes
This was such an open ended project visually that styleframes were absolutely essential. I tried to create a range of styles from a more infographicy/editorial style piece to a really bright and colourful cartoony look and feel. Although these obviously won’t be used going forward I still wanted to give them a home as I love all of them and didn’t want to lock them away forever.
I love creating styleframes as it’s that beautiful moment at the start of a project when anything can happen visually. I never know what’s going to be on my screen at the end of the day and that’s exciting… terrifying but exciting.
