This is a video project commissioned by the NHS Lothian’s Department of Dermatology. Me and my colleague Samantha Hannah were tasked with designing a friendly tutorial video on how to apply emollients. This video would be sent to the patients as a guide for their daily routines.

 

Tools

Photoshop | Illustrator | After Effects | Premiere Pro | Audition

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The creative process started with some rough sketches of the characters. The client wanted it to be interesting and a two person dynamic, so we came up with a cat and his owner.

 

Samantha proceeded to sketch the first rendition, and by the time the client gave us feedback we got to the end result. Some minor changes went into the human character to make it easier to rig, but apart from that it is faithful to the sketch.

After the sketching phase I stepped in and brought the Photoshop files into After effects. My job was to give the sketch a skeleton with functioning articulations in order to animate it throughout the video.

 

Using the Duik plugin I created a bone structure with joints and IK controls. Each scene would have an instance of the base matrix, to avoid keyframes overlapping. It took a lot of time and attention to details, but eventually the puppets moved great. The biggest challenge was rigging the cat. I have never worked with animal characters before, and I had to do some research on feline bone and muscle structure in order to get it right.