Animated Character Explainer Excerpt | Sea Beast Media

This is an excerpt from a character led explainer video I created. It's been shrunk in size and rendered at a reduced quality for Dribble.

My remit- as Sea Beast Media - was to take an existing character design and produce a fun animated advert. The character, Ali, was a mascot of sorts. I ultimately produced more work in this style.

My role was comprehensive: I took the project from conception thru to final render on my own, going through a process of script writing, illustration, animation, revision and delivery. I also sourced and licensed appropriate music.

The character is animated using simple forward kinematics in After Effects. This led to quite stiff movements, but I tried to animate him in a way that leaned into that limitation. He thrusts his hands on his hips defiantly. If I could redo the job I would rig him in a more complex way.

To embellish the flat art style, which can feel slightly unfinished, I used a photographed texture which changes once every few frames. I need to improve my use of texture, generally. The spiralling paint drop at the start of the animation is an image sequence.

Where possible, I used expressions to add life. The 8 icons at the end of the excerpt, for example, are animated in with the famous inertial bounce expression. Bouncing features, like the clouds, are driven by a simple sine/cosine expression. I first noticed a similar effect used in the PC game Worms Armageddon on the game's flammable oil barrels which move in a similar way over time.

Once rigged, the Ali character was ready for use in other campaign materials. The rig I made allowed for arm movement, head rotation, eye movement, eyebrow raises and mouth changes. I used expressions to allow for head nodding: a Slider on a Null was used to push his face up and down and drive time remapping on his precomped head bands. This setup makes it very easy to animate him nodding in the future using a series of controls on a Null. The wind swept edges of his clothing are achieved with a Wave Warp.

If you'd like a similar animated explainer video please contact me at Sea Beast Media!