Thursday, October 31, 2013

Yoplait Strawberry Banana (Yoplait 40 Flavors of Inspiration)

Back in February, I produced this piece for Yoplait as part of their "40 Flavors of Inspiration" series.


Credits:
Concept, Art & Animation by: Segun O. Mosuro
Agency: Aniboom / Saatchi & Saatchi
Client: Yoplait
Producer: Yonny Zafrani
Music: Apollo Symphony Orchestra, Joe Sacco


My initial pitch was heavily Greek influenced, the concept was "You'll feel like a goddess when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" (the target audience was women). The cast would include Cupid, and a young woman, named Lisa. The setting was a modern-day Greek garden, Lisa would interact with the garden after it is transformed into a strawberry-banana wonderland. Based on feedback from the client, I revised the concept; The Greek garden became a park with a gazebo, Cupid became a strawberry-banana fairy... The whole idea was pushed into a more "life is a party when you're eating Yoplait's Strawberry Banana flavor yogurt" direction.

A still from the piece. © Aniboom.
One of the ideas from my original pitch that remained intact was the transformation of the garden/park into a fruit-shaped landscape. The visuals of the fruit-shaped landscape, were inspired by the work of the amazing painter, Will Cotton (some of you may know him from his work on that California Gurls music video, and yes I'm aware he did lots of paintings long before that). That said I'm no Will Cotton, my final paintings are far from masterful.

I animated the characters and effects classically in Flash using a Wacom tablet, there is some motion tweening here and there but I generally couple it with classical Flash animation. The backgrounds were painted in Photoshop.

The animation is not as consistent as I'll like it to be, some scenes received way more attention than others, I ended up having to cut back on the quality of the animation and overall production value as the deadline approached. Drawing-wise, I had some problems keeping track of my volumes in Flash and clean-up was a long nightmarish process [using Flash's line tool]; I initially went for a thick to thin clean-up line, and very quickly abandoned that because of time restrictions. I was forced to reevaluate my approach to classical clean-up animation in Flash when the project was done.

In the future, I'll update this post with more behind the scenes work. Till then, enjoy this animation progression reel for one of the scenes in this piece:






Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Ursus arctos arctos studies

I've been studying Eurasian brown bears for a project. These quick studies were drawn from video footage, 1 minute per drawing.

Medium (graphite)


Medium (graphite)


Medium (graphite)

Friday, June 21, 2013

Boomerang Buildings Intro Video

I had the opportunity to design and animate this explainer video for Boomerang Buildings:


(I should add that this is the short version of the video)

Boomerang Buildings supplied the script and voice-over track (voiced by Brad Ziffer). I created a rough animatic to help work out the visual ideas, story and timing. I tried to keep it fun and convey the message visually. Here is a section of the animatic:


(Medium: Photoshop/After Effects)

The character design was initially based on a more '50s & '60s UPA look (as seen in the animatic above), but that was later abandoned for a stickman look.

Once the animatic was locked down, I created color thumbnails in Photoshop and style frames in Flash.
The overall visual design is simple & graphic. I don't think I did that good of a job on the design, but i'll keep learning.

Color Studies (Medium: Photoshop)

Style Frames (Medium: Flash)

The final piece was illustrated and animated in Flash. The character was all Flash classical animation (2d-Flash or drawn) on twos and above, depending on how much action the scene called for. Symbol animation (Flash tweening) was used for the non-character elements.

Here are some stills from the final video:






Thursday, June 20, 2013

Sage's Song (Pumpkinheads™) Animated Book Trailer

I had the fun opportunity to animate this trailer for an awesome children's book called "Sage's Song".



"Sage's Song" is part of the Pumpkinheads™ children's book series. If you have young children, check out the books here. You can also view more videos and trailers here.

I received Adobe Illustrator artwork created for the book by illustrator & animator Matthew Wilson and creator & author Karen Kilpatrick. I used a combination of Flash, After Effects and Blender 3d to animate the art.

I did some minor editing, no animation from me (other than the end screen), on the trailer for "Ella's Toys":