ICONOCRASH

Every year, Freeform helps their viewers get into the holiday spirit with their fan favorite 25 Days of Christmas programming — a strong lineup of festive movies and specials airing throughout December and wrapping up on Christmas Day. In order to keep the holiday mood flowing during the primetime commercial breaks, Freeform asked us to create a series of animations that would showcase their existing iconographic characters in different and wacky scenarios.

Right away, we knew that these animations wouldn’t have audio. This challenged us to imagine interactions which would be easily understood by the viewer while also creating an emotional connection with the characters through visuals only. We also had to keep in mind that these animations would be airing for four minutes, adjacent to a stream of advertisements. Though we would need to create engaging content that could hold viewers’ attention throughout, we also had to be mindful not to distract from the content and messaging of the advertisements.

Using Freeform’s existing icon library, we pulled together the best pairings of characters for the most entertaining and unexpected results. Cat and Dog, Gingerbread Man and Nutcracker, and Snowman and Yeti, all face-off in an array of original, light-hearted, and Christmas-centric protagonist vs. antagonist storylines inspired by the playful mischief exampled throughout classic Tom & Jerry episodes. Adding limbs and a catalog of facial expressions, we brought these Freeform icons to life via Adobe After Effects and finalized their look in Illustrator. Though the original piece was made intentionally without audio, we decided to add a fun arrangement for our own personal use.

In these next few sections we will take you through a little bit of our process and our journey from kickoff to completion. We like to showcase some of these behind the scenes tidbits in order to paint a larger picture of the decisions that were made and the thought processes that led us to where we ended up in the end. Below we will take a look at our character studies and art direction. As a quick note, all aspects of this project were created using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.

Though the main “faces” of each character were already at our disposal in icon form, we needed to expand their range of emotions in order to depict more expressive reactions in each scenario. Along with creating a set of 5 emotions for each icon, we also added limbs to each, allowing the characters to participate in these various actions in a clear manner.

In order to streamline the animation of our icon characters, we created a system of rigs combining the use of Joysticks and Sliders, and Rubberhose. Joysticks and Sliders was used to ease between facial expressions, while we used Rubberhose to control the movement of the characters’ limbs. An example of this system can be seen in the images below.

Before we nailed down the central storylines of each interaction, we started to explore what kind of environments these events could take place in, and what those might look like. Our initial train of thought took us down a path akin to another classic “cat & mouse” example: Looney Tunes’ Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner. Here is an example of our own interpretation of this style, with a collection of images we sourced for reference and inspiration shown below.

Building off of that initial style exploration, we began to define how these scenarios would play out in more Christmas-y, home-y feeling environments. At this time, we began to build a better grasp on the interactions between the characters, and decided it would be best to limit each pairing to one larger environment that could then be broken down into smaller areas for each storyline.

The last step was to color block each scene. Using the established color palette for Freeform’s 25 Days of Christmas, we played around with both night scenes and day scenes. We started out with a night scene look, exampled in the image here, but eventually decided to keep it light and sunny and super cheery throughout. While the background elements of each environment are kept to a pale blue, we used the darker, more saturated colors to highlight important actions and props in each scene. This is showcased in the resulting images below.