TBS approached us to create a series of five funny vignettes to promote their new digital comedy website, The Heckler. Splashed across all of their social media channels, these humorous takes on today’s romantic situations were aimed at people in their 20s to drive traffic and awareness of TBS’s new site.
After we brought in a professional comedian friend to punch up the scripts with some extra humor, we let our imagination take over as we started to work on the look and feel. A flat, pop-art style emerged that would appeal to millennials.
Character development all starts with drawing as we fill our sketchbooks with ideas and possible styles.
We started sketching the title cards to start each vignette before finalizing the design. Then we spent time researching and developing the look for the diverse range of characters we were dreaming up.
Flamethrowers. Waterworks. Jets spewing money. The quick-hitting stories were taking shape. We mapped out all of the action and movements on storyboards so TBS could approve the direction and our motion artists knew all the steps that needed to happen.
Next up was refining all of the characters and adding in details like texturing to give the flat drawings a bit of dimension to pop off the page.
We created a wide cast of colorful characters and made them able to instantly express their exaggerated emotions in humorous ways through their poses and facial expressions.
We did not use traditional animation to make the illustrations move. Using breakthrough technology, we were able to make all of the characters come alive with accurate facial movements including lip syncing. How? We are able to take new audio and visual inputs to create realistic motion for the characters. Press play on the quick video below to see this technology in action.
–Carole Angelo, TBS
