Antivirus Magazine x Moodycat Studio

Moodycat Studio were approached by Antivirus Magazine, the leading LGBTQI+ magazine in Greece, to create some animated graphics to add to a campaign tackling the subject of hate speech and hate crime. They wanted to create 4 characters: Empathy, Empowerment, Hate Crime and Hate Speech, to respond to the live action footage interviews.

The characters were designed by Jo Dertili and Mikaela K. Deligianni at Moodycat Studio who also oversaw animation direction. You can read more about their design process for these characters on their website.

I was provided with a brief of what actions needed animating (and which needed to loop) as well as the character designs and turnarounds. My first step was to recreate these illustrations as vector designs in Adobe Illustrator so they could be rigged easier in After Effects. Since we had a fast turnaround for this project I didn’t do any complex rigging, I used Rubberhose for the limbs and rigged the rest using child/parent structures and nulls.

My next step was to start blocking the animation. I had a lot of animations to complete so I decided that submitting blocked animation for feedback as I went along would create a system of rolling feedback so we could avoid having too many large amends at the end of the project. These blocked animations were also sent to the client to ensure that we had captured what they wanted and to get sign off before I refined the animation.

Once these were approved, I moved onto refining the animation. It was very satisfying to add little details of secondary movement and follow through when I had time!

At delivery we sent the editor .mov renders and the After Effects to the editor who created the final edit. At the time of writing it is a social campaign but the client was very happy with the work and looks to expand to a television campaign as well.