Nike Pitch for BIeN
One of my assignments as part of my animation apprenticeship with BIEN was to create a frame-by-frame animation for a pitch for Nike. I received two styleframes of the character mid-run from an illustrator, and fleshed out the animation from rough to clean up. I worked closely with the creative director, who wanted the runner to feel heroic and epic, which we achieved through experimenting with exaggerated timing and perspective. I used Toon Boom Harmony for the cel animation and After Effects for texturing and compositing.
The following videos document my process for creating the final animation.
Here’s an early rough animation where I focused mostly on movement and foot placement in the run.
In later versions the creative director and I discussed how we could get the character to feel like he was bursting out of the Nike logo at a fantastic speed. We scrapped the jump and used blobs and lines to distort the character in the beginning. I was also asked to push the timing and exaggerate the slow-mo in the middle.
This is a shot of the animation with most of the tiedown completed and a bit of color added. I thought ahead to how I’d bring my work into AE for final compositing. There were multiple layers, such as the laces, stripe and dots, all with different treatments that needed to be addressed.
This clip shows most of the animation finished. I experimented with painting in the blue stripe on the pants with Procreate and Adobe Animate, but found the brush that matched the styleframes most closely in Toon Boom. I hand-painted the stripe in and then moved on to the laces, texture and logo, after which the animation was finished.