UNICORNOLOGY VODCAST WITH LARRY KIM

Project Brief

When Larry Kim from Wordstream approached us with a need for animated intro and outro for his vodcast, his only instructions were to include unicorns, rainbows and rockets.

He wanted quirky and fun animation that would begin and end his videos.

Process

We knew that it would be challenging to incorporate all three elements into one meaningful animation. Our process began with brainstorming ideas for the intro animation. We came up with the idea of a unicorn in a meadow who sprints towards rocket and goes off to space.

When we did a first sketch, draft looked great but it was missing something… Starting with a unicorn from the very beginning didn't feel right. We needed something to trigger the unicorn to start running so we came up with additional silly moment where we have a horse minding his own business and then a lightning transforms him into a beautiful unicorn.

That completed the idea and we proceeded with creating an animation.

First, we created a background plate in one huge composition and animated elements within it, like trees and clouds.

Then we proceeded to create our animated characters.

Each character was created in Illustrator and then broke down to individual elements so it can be easily animated in After Effects. We used combination of puppet tool with various deform effect and wiggle expressions to get the natural animated look of each character. Most challenging part was creating a run cycle for the unicorn but with that out of the way we hit home stretch.

All that was left to do was create rocket flight animation. We used sprites for flames and Trapcode Particular with custom particles for rocket smoke.

After some time spent playing with font choice and text alignment, we animated the text and added Turbulent Displace
effect to get that wobbly feeling.

For the outro, we wanted to have something that would continue on intro story wise. We came up with idea that our unicorn would land on alien planet and claim it up as his. Unfortunately, that didn't go well with our angry little green friend…

After we did all animations, we brought video files into Adobe Premiere where we added a bunch of audio effects and nice funky music background to complete both videos.

Result

In the end, Larry was very happy how everything looked. We managed to incorporate everything he asked for and create a meaningful story from it in just few seconds.

We were also pleased with the look and sound of everything, especially since it was our first cartoon character animation.
Have a look at both videos and we hope you'll enjoy it as much as we do.