Puffball Panic

Once the script was locked from the content team I started with just an rough initiation of this project by deciding on the art/animation style that we should be following through the videos that would be exciting and could possibly connect with the colours kids could easily understand and perceive and also is less on the eyes, subsequently the color theory laid out in the R&D stage. I started with the sketching it in procreate and then slowly moving it in to illustration to finalise on the character design and eventually creating the turnover for each. In parallel, I dive deep into brainstorming the idea of backgrounds where our dust bunnies could be placed and how to come up with a way for them to talk through montages and indirect addressing while learning and showing as they progress to learn the concept of coding. The same ideology was followed for creating the Intro title card for each episodes and because of that we were able to find ways to create something out with the art assets created for the series.

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The concept of the video was kept quite and simple in terms of art requirements as we decided on setting up the whole story inside a young kids room, we took to unreal engine to setup complete 360° view of the room, I took a week to finally decide on how the interior of the room should should be looking and what kind of props and assets we could be seen using that would be understand and be known to kids by that age so that they sense a feel of similarity from the actual world. Each props added or any element created were thought meticulously because we could be seen using them in the episodes. This not only helped us to bring down the time and resources in the team, but also gave a perception of continuity to this video

The most challenging part that I faced before starting with the actual animation process for the videos was in the animatics stage, as the whole series were only limited to just 10 episodes, we wanted to try a lot of different things and come up with one or more ways to show certain concepts of coding, because we wanted it to look more similar to the kids cartoons usually are. Upon some back and forth I finally got and a GO for the POC stage and from their the procrastination of mine begin about how I wanted the characters to act, walk and dance, how to make it look more engaging and exciting for the kids. I did do some improvisation even at the final stage if it didn't stand up to what I had imagined for this video.

As the backgrounds was to be remained the same, I just had to use the different angles and shots of the room at places. The prior decision of creating the 360° view of the room came in handy here, as I had enough BG shots of different corners of the room to work with in the entire series. The only time I took to decide was where our dust bunnies should be placed, and that place has to remain a permanent area for the dust bunnies, so the inspiration was just like we have come up earlier was taken from real life situations i.e, usually we find most of the dust and used thrown away or per say the missing socks of kids under the bed, and so like that, it should be the exact in case of our dust bunnies, we had them stay in inside the bed alongside the pile of missing socks of kids. Similar direction were followed while thinking for every episodes frames.

As Super Squad, the same video production process was followed across each episodes and there were full screen animations (each lasting 60-80 seconds) spread across all 10 episodes in the series animated by me . As I mentioned at the beginning, I had customised intro sequence created for each episodes by taking already designed frames from the room background I created with my team.

You can check out the final render for the complete videos animated by me, here.