Freelance - lgbtmentalhealth.ie - Video 1

I recently completed a long project for GLEN and BeLonG To Youth Service on behalf of the National Office for Suicide Prevention. It was the first time I have handled an entire project from start to finish. Initially I was asked to do the script but in the end it was handled by the client. With that exception I took care of finding the music, the character design, asset creation and finally animation and editing.

I really took a lot of pleasure in investigating the style based on the clients description, my previous work for the Freshly Squeezed 2012 Promo was citied as a good example of the kind of humour, and Dumb Ways to Die by Metro Australia in terms of visual style. I spent some time analysing the simple design approach and for the first time found a name to describe it - flat design. Following those design principles was great for a number of reasons - aesthetically, but also technically: The flat colours and lack of gradients meant that my meagre machine was able to comfortably handle puppet tool animation with ease (my previous experience of animating using this method has been slow and oftentimes frustrating) - it meant that rather than separating the limbs at the joints and posing the characters by rotation and parenting I could now really play with squash and stretch and get a nice organic feel to the animation. Not only this but the render times in the beginning were relatively fast even with motion blur. (Later when creating the second and third videos I kept them all in the same project file to allow me to easily share assests without importing other projects and risking duplicated compositions, which was a good move but ended up increasing the render time.)

I am very pleased with the project, it was really a great opportunity for me to get back into character animation - something which I haven't done on this scale since working on 'I'm a Monster!' in Dublin in 2011.