TIFFY, “DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY”
HOW IT BEGAN
The project began working with the inked watercolor pages, originally illustrated by Joe Botsch. The leap from static illustration to motion graphics, requires a lot of illustrative steps, while sustaining Joe’s bold style. This required further developing the world, and honing in on what the important story beats were.
My first step was to illustrate in Joe’s style any “in between” poses needed for frame by frame animation. If the contestants arms fly out wide in excitement, there needed to be drawings to get the preparing pose, the transitional pose, to the exaggerated pose. This meant it was time to draw, alot.
Next step was to illustrate the backgrounds, and properly layer them so depth could be achieved in the motion. This meant I had a final illustration but I needed break it apart into smaller puzzle pieces in order to create micro-expression, and micro-motions throughout the film. This required redrawing everything Joe had inked into Adobe Illustrator.
HOW TO MAKE IT FUNNY
The key to making this piece’s thru line a success was in landing Tiffy’s facial expressions of humiliation and embarrassment. As a designer working in 2D there are quite a few ways to do this. I could have redrawn every expression and change them frame by frame. I could have puppetted some basic features in DUIK. I decided since this was a riff on a campy graphic novel, I may make sense to make the actions very cheesy. I decided to go a nonconventional route drawing the basic expressions, key framing their movement, a few puppet pins, and scaling so it felt more exaggerated and hambone styled.
HOW TO MAKE IT POP
Since this was such a graphic based piece, it felt important to make the piece feel vibrant and bold. I leaned on a bold 1960’s modern color palette, and used geometry in transitions that were reminiscent Bauhaus art style. In creating the neon lights that pop, I worked with Maxon plugins to further the look