THE MIRON BRAND LOOP
I was approached by my colleagues on the marketing team with a need for some sort of animated visuals to really hammer home how a brand works during new hire training. At first, they were just thinking about some more simple infographics, but I was interested in trying out character animation for the very first time ever. I quickly storyboarded out the overall idea based on their pitch, and they loved the direction!
Because it was my first time attempting any sort of character animation, I kept the rest of the graphics simple. The circular frame reinforced the idea, but also put emphasis on the characters and eliminated the need to juggle background elements as well. This would keep my focus as well as the newly hired viewers.
I thought things would be easier to understand with a voice track, so, using my own script, I recorded the lines. Initially I just wanted something to provide direction and animate the words to, but the team thought my voice fit so well they wanted to keep it in.
THE CHARACTERS
I am not an illustrator by trade and I’ve never really tried character design either, so I utilized some stock vectors for the overall shapes and style, but these graphics had to be heavily modified as well as separated in order to animate them. After a solid foundation, I illustrated versions of the owners group, which obviously didn’t exist in stock form.
Within After Effects, I hand animated many of the characters in the first few scenes. After finishing those, I tried a rigging plugin called DUIK to finish things. While DUIK has its own set of complexities, the inverse kinematic calculations turned out to be a big time-saver.
