SuperSquad
Client: Tynker
Animation: Nirbhay Kumar
Storyboard: Nirbhay Kumar, Vinutha J, Alan Gills, Abraham, A.T. Bijukumar, Vishnu P Balachandar, Pramod K
Motion Graphic: Nirbhay Kumar, Jim Francis C, Safiyudheen Edavanna, Shivam Kaushik & Mahesh Nagaraj
Music/SFX: BYJU'S Inhouse Studio
VO: BYJU'S Inhouse Studio
Super Squad is part of Tynker’s digital literacy coursework for grades K-2. I worked on dozens of educational videos on the key concepts that every kid needs to know, including online safety, etiquette, computing basics, and cybersecurity. I teamed up to create a high-quality animated series using different animal characters each with its unique super powers and they could be seen teaching various computer-related concepts across the 100 episodes spanning video content out of which 16 videos were designed and animated by me using tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator for Character Turnarounds and Background Environment setup, Toon Boom Storyboard Pro for the Animatics, After Effects for the Motion Graphics in between the modular sections and Adobe Animate for the Character Animation and the Full-Screen Animation throughout.
Art Style
I started out this process with writing down the ideas I had, but as I learnt from my previous project, I needed to clearly have a rough draft of each scene and the colour that we could be using for our final assets and how the characters we be blending seamlessly in the foregrounds, and transitions, in order not to be stuck at the design or animation phase. So I had to spend a long time on this phase, as I was not getting a concrete idea, and was not seeing the entire flow in my mind. I was able to conquer the challenge, by putting together few rough sketches and using vector assets from freepik. This helped me visualize how the idea could be better represented, and also helped with the flow of the entire piece.
Storyboard
Having concluded on the direction of the episodes, with the script, the storyboarding phase was quite easy, and fun. I endeavoured to stretch my storyboarding skill a little bit here, making the frames look children friendly and adding of enough props in the background alongside the animated characters that are being used. The same storyboarding process was carried throughout the other videos in the series as well, where the FSA segments were at the beginning and end of the episodes followed by modular section in between. The few images from the episodes are shared below to give the viewers an idea about what could be expected in the complete series.
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Animatic
Well, the major challenges in this project was that it needed most of the frames approved in the animatics stage, so we created a proof of concept(POC) for each video episodes as we went along and before finally moving it in the post production stage, I made sure that to watch every animatic version of the episodes and get its approval before reflecting the same in the final designed video.
StyleFrame
The style framing for this video course was pretty straight forward, I had fun creating the buildings in particular, seeing I had a design style in mind which would be cohesive with what colour style we usually seen in cartoons, I was able to make a blend of the style, and the direction for the video keeping in mind of our audience which are preferably between 5-7 years.
Overview
The video production process was followed the same across each episodes and there were full screen animations (each lasting 60-80 seconds) spread across all 16 episodes in the series animated by me. A customised intro sequence created to put in the beginning of each video by taking small action snippets from all the episodes in the series.
You can check out the final render with watermark for the videos animated by me, here.
