By Sophia Bonaccorsi & Nico Dicola
Ideation
Brief
Create an animated segment for Sesame Street. This project will combine all your knowledge of 2D and 3D animation as well as the hand skills learned in Animation Techniques to create a whimsical, tactile and fun animation for one of the world’s most successful franchises.
Research
Sesame Street aims “to help children everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder.” They are not afraid to take a stand towards inclusivity and progression. Simplicity is key in not only design, but also in efforts to make complicated things easy to understand.
Pitch
Dress up Dreams
A brother and sister are playing dress up.
The brother puts on a knight costume, and the sister puts on a princess outfit, but they don’t look happy.
The kids have an idea, and switch their costumes, both looking much happier.
Final message of the segment is “Be what makes you happy”
This design style was chosen to move forward, but it didn't include all the required styles, so we had to rework it. The composition was also weak and needed to focus more on the kids.
Animatic
Summary
This stage of the project was about developing the story we wanted to tell and finalizing our style frame so we could move forward with animation.
Notes
At this point, the story wasn't fully reading, it wasn't clear why the kids were sad so we had to revise the story before animating. We also decided to laser cut the puppets on a different material because the felt wasn't working for the faces.
First Pass
Summary
For first pass, we aimed to have a more successful story and to start developing the animation. At this stage we had made test puppets in after effects before we moved to stop motion so we would have reference to work from.
Notes
After this we realized the story still wasn't working. We needed to see the kids in normal and traditional gender clothes first to indicate why they're upset. We also needed to fix the title card and start on stop motion.
Second Pass
Summary
This pass had completed animation throughout so we could focus on making any changes to make it read better.
Notes
The story was reading better at this pass, but we decided it would be helpful to have a voice over to really push the message. We also had to fix some pacing and shorten the into card.
Revision Pass
Summary
At this point, we were close to our final product. We inputted our audio and were working on smaller details.
Notes
At this stage, we had to fix our voice over timing a little bit and add more cel to make the piece come to life more. We also decided we had to make our call to action card the same stop motion as our intro card.