Bravo Character design and animation process

I thought it might be neat to walk through my process on creating some character designs and animations I was commissioned to do for a company called Bravo, so here we go!

The Sketch
The initial design brief called for a few different characters, a gorilla, a lobster and a pineapple! I got to sketching out some concepts, and thankfully the initial designs were accepted, and I was able to move on with the design process. This isn't always the case, most projects will have some back and forth during the concept phase until the client is happy with the direction.

Refining the sketch
The next step was to take these sketches in to Adobe Illustrator, where I then refined the character designs and began adding color. It's really neat to see the concepts start to take form and Illustrator makes it very easy to refine and modify the shapes of each character. The refined illustrations were then sent to the client, and after a few color tweaks and minor adjustments, the designs were ready to be animated.

Animation!
The animations needed to be exported as looping GIFs, so I had to keep that in mind when setting out to create the motion for these characters. They needed to be interesting, but couldn't be too long. I began by separating the moveable parts of each character in Illustrator, then importing these pieces in to Adobe After Effects, where I then rigged up the characters. For the most part, this involves moving pivot points and parenting things like the head to the body, arms to the body, hands to the arms, etc.

I then began roughing out the motion, thinking about some key poses I wanted each character to hit. Using keyframe easing, rotating elements and moving elements, I was then able to create the following animations.

I then had to save out various sized GIFs, each of which had different background colors.

I really enjoyed working on this project, and I hope you enjoyed seeing the process. Feel free to leave any comments or questions you have for me in the comments section!