We had the pleasure of joining Habitual Media as a creative partner. We got to bring life into Beavertown's Creative Space series, through animating some of their characters and other assets from their well-known branding, integrating it into live action scenes.
The process for this project involved layering the illustrations in a suitable way for importing into After Effects, rigging the characters, animating the characters and other assets, tracking cameras, and compositing the animated content into live action scenes.
Layering and rigging the Beavertown characters was a fulfilling challenge, as there is a lot of detail in Nick Dwyer's illustrations. I used Duik to rig limbs and coded a number of expressions and sliders to add in those emotive details.
A lot of the scenes involved tracking the camera in 3D space and then placing the elements in Z space with shadows, lighting, reflections, and focal blurring to create realism and give as much depth as possible.
Thanks to 'Pretty Sweet 2D Animation Toolkit', we were able to manipulate a few of their cel-style liquid transitions to create the logo reveal for the intros/outros, transitions and mattes.
Check out the whole series below.
Producer: Nick Forester
Animation: DOGDOGDOG Studios
Creative/Editor: Callum Pearson
Camera: Sam Hayes-Watkins, Toby Leary
Sound Design/Music: Jack Gordon
Featuring: Nick Dwyer
Produced by Habitual Media