Personalized Pathways | Cutdown

This project really pushed our capabilities in illustration and texture painting. We enjoyed creating scenes in the Pacific Northwest wilderness and using that imagery as a metaphor for a 7th-12th grade education. This is a short cutdown from the longer project.

Client: SCS
Creative Direction: Anna Grace Botka
Illustration: Anna Grace Botka
2D Animation & Compositing: Kevin Botka
3D Animation: Kevin Botka, Anna Grace Botka
Character Animation: Kevin Botka, Anna Grace Botka
Sound Design: Anna Grace Botka

"We are very pleased with the final result. Looks great and we’ll be able to use it right away on our website. Thanks again for creating a great video for us!"

Laird Leavitt

Superintendent, SCS
SeaTac, WA

Challenge

Our client asked us to communicate their new program with an animated video that captured the complex offering in a simple and easy to understand way.

Solution

We designed playful and engaging visuals to metaphorically represent the journey that these students would take. The client was able to use this video in the launch campaign and easily explain this new program.

Approach

Using a combination of 3D and 2D illustrations and animation, we created a stylized world in the Pacific Northwest that would be recognizable to the audience. Using various digital painting techniques, we created backgrounds that we could combine with our 3D characters.

We spent a lot of time fine-tuning the look of the characters and made sure that they would match the look of the backgrounds. We created UV maps and used the same brushes we used for the background to paint details and texture directly onto the characters.

UV map for the body

UV map for the shirt

Rendering with flat lighting, a telescopic camera lens and animating on 2's helped sell the look and make the characters feel more integrated into the style. Creating the characters in 3D allowed us to quickly pose and animate a larger number of shots and helped the process go faster as we had to work within tight budgetary constraints.