A record release campaign for the musical artist Tiffy, highlighting the single “Dont Take It Personally.” The campaign involved physical media as vinyl records, music videos, digital album covers, and social media posts.
As a designer, how on earth do you sell embarrassment so it is palpable enough, to make consumers not just watch the video, and engage with it, but then buy the album? This problem reminded me of something I read years ago. Almost two decades ago when learning film, I was fascinated by a concept called Scopophilia, coined by writer Laura Mulvey. She concept was that people love engaging in the fantasy. It doesn’t matter if the fantasy is positive or negative. She claimed people fall into two groups, voyeurs who love watching, and her counter group, those that react to being watched. I used this logic, what if the Tiffy character’s embarrassment is heightened cause she’s on a game show on live tv? Its not just that she is on a game show in her dream, but that stakes are heightened. She is on a game show and people are watching and ridiculing her. This heightened the viewer experience and they felt for the character. This in turn, would make them engage with the rest of the campaign.
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