Happy Holidays, World!
Yes world! We at ThreeHouse wanted to send our best to you and your families during the holiday season.
We were extremely excited to hook up with fellow Kansas City creative studio, House of Tears Design, to construct an e-card for an international shipping company, Phoenix International. The card’s purpose was not only to thank clients all across the globe for their business, but to spread the joy of giving and sharing with one’s community.
From the beginning, we knew that this was going to be a big mile marker for the ThreeHouse team. House of Tears Design gave us a long creative leash to develop the concept of the e-card based on Phoenix International’s three pillars: Planet, People, and Prosperity.
Kevin took charge of the design process, the characters, and the overall glow the piece would have. This was where he ran! Character design is a realm where he excels, and hasn’t done for an animation since our senior thesis film 2 years ago. We wanted to make this piece as beautiful as we could, so we put in extra effort.
We were definitely going to take advantage of this creative freedom although we sometimes made things more challenging for ourselves. The bear on the bike is an example of that. He was going to be a difficult animation problem to solve, making his feet propel the petals. The furry guy was so cute though, we sacrificed our sanity during the animation process.
I learned a lot from animating on this card. The bike and the bear were difficult to figure out. Though he rode the bike for only about 3 seconds in the entire piece, I tried to do quite a bit of research on my own bike out in the parking lot, paying attention to the ratio between my tire speed and my pedaling and how my torso was moving while I pedaled.
One of my favorite sections to work on was the sad fox and his reaction to receiving the bike. It takes him a second to comprehend the gift. He wipes his nose, straightens his tail, jumps on and is ready to go! The challenge was to give these characters that are limited flat puppets, facial expressions and emotions. The solutions might be subtle, like a twitch of the ear.
Another highlight of this process was showing a studio-mate’s 3-year-old daughter the squirrels that I had been animating. She told her father that night her favorite thing about his new studio was the running squirrel. So cute!
I hope that you all can enjoy this as much as we have enjoyed working on it.
Tags: character design, Holiday e-card, House of Tears, Phoenix International