A winter character was required by the NSPCC for their Christmas campaign against cruelty to children.
It needed to perform a number of actions animated and delivered in flash.
Character Design
Client Brief
We were sub-contracted by another agency to handle this character design and animation work from scratch. The brief was simple, the NSPCC want a winter character to be the face of its Christmas campaign against the cruelty to children. It needed to be animated in flash performing a number of different actions from magically pulling a present out of thin air to cart wheeling around the screen.
The outcome
We threw together a number of winter characters from a robin to a snowman but after some careful deliberation it was agreed that an elf would make a good choice. The elf itself went through a few stages of refinements until we settled on this little fellow.
Character Animation
On agreeing the design, the character was broken apart in flash and a character pack was created using a number of preset arm, leg, head, eye, hand, body, leg and feet movements. Each part was then placed on a live keyframe and animated as required. Each animation was sketched out and thumbnailed to begin with in order to get the timings correct before animating. As each animation was blocked out it was sent to the client for approval before final refinements were made. A file with all completed animation were delivered to the client where they went on to get coded into a flash screensaver downloadable from the NSPCC website. All the work was completed in about 4 days, a quick turnaround for a lot of work but it was an enjoyable project to be involved with.