Date: May 17, 2021 ◼︎ Client: Picl Animation/Whalebone Films ◼︎ Role: Director/Animator ◼︎ Platform: Web/Social ◼︎ Software: Blender, DaVinci Resolve
Overview
KAICIID Dialogue Centre bring together people from different beliefs and backgrounds to foster dialogue. The goal is to bring about understanding, overcome animosities, reduce fear and instil mutual respect. All lovely stuff in my book. They wanted an animation to explain what is dialogue, so Whalebone Films and Picl Animation put their heads together to work their magic.
With Whalebone handling a story that tied everything together, Picl handled the lovely visuals. Picl developed an abstract hand-drawn style, where characters are represented by shapes. Each shape is unique, with the type of shape, their colour and size representing differences in each person. I’m a big fan of analogue, hand-drawn animation, but actually hand drawing this would have take far too much time. We needed some digital fakery and, after some testing, we landed on the Grease Pencil tool in Blender. Grease Pencil ticked all our boxes: Animation on 2’s. Check. Textured strokes. Check. Flexible rigs. Check. Ability to change the look of strokes to represent different emotions. Check.
The end result? Well, you can see it above. The client was so happy with the animation that they created a dedicated page on their website for it. Another lovely project with lovely people that I was lucky enough to work on 🙂