The idea was to tell an animated story for a Black Friday campaign based on a song about buying things that are more useful.
A story and a song would have to be about useless things you buy on Black Friday and regret later. Like buying an iPhone charger only to find out later that you have an Android phone.
Total length - 45 seconds with shorter 15 second versions
An important part of this project was to adhere to the specified brand colors.
To find the best style for our characters, we started looking for references. The main idea was to find characters with rounded corners and pleasant shapes. We prepared a few types of future characters to show a client. A happy girl, a friendly man with a beard, and a tall, handsome young man.
After discussion with a client, we decided that our characters would look like the first concept.
A happy girl started to be a reference for other characters. In this step we started to think about the details for each character that we needed to prepare.
Paying attention to detail is our favourite part of the job, because we know it is essential to creating the right mood. We imagined all these characters in real life, what they are like and what hobbies they have. What kind of clothes they prefer.
That helped us understand what kind of goods they would buy on Black Friday. All these moods and details were applied to the clothes, body shapes and textures.
The last but not least step before we start animating all the scenes with characters is a storyboard and an animatic.
This helps us to see how many frames we have for each scene, what we need to animate and how many frames we have for each movement within each scene. It's a crucial step that we recommend you do before you sit down and do a final animation for all the elements.
Here you can find different shots as a final result for two videos: Maudau Black Friday and New Year version.
