Riley’s Story

AWARDS
2015 BADC Award: “Art Direction” – GOLD
2015 BADC Award: “Animation Motion Graphics” – GOLD
2015 BADC Award: “Animation – 2D/3D” – BRONZE

Director/Animator: Ian Anderson
Art Director/Compositor: Zenon Kohler
Animators: Matt Dye and Jasper St Aubyn West
Composer and Sound Designer: Louai Naouri
VFX Producer: Flavia Riley
Post Producer: Samara Jones

Publicis Mojo Executive Creative Director, Andy Ward, approached Cutting Edge to animate the confronting true story of Riley and his sister, two children who, after suffering abuse, are now on the road to recovery thanks to the help of Act For Kids. To reinforce the isolation and vulnerability of the children, we proposed a digitally-animated watercolour style featuring a monochromatic colour palette.

The challenge was to capture the essence of a traditional animation technique, as if every second frame had been hand painted and photographed. An early look development stage resulted in a streamlined After Effects workflow consisting of an elaborate combination of fully-customisable precompositions.

After storyboarding, a timing animatic was cut to a guide voice-over track. All character and environment assets were designed in a flat, vector style consisting of solid graphic colours which was then animated in Photoshop and After Effects. Once the animation was approved, final compositing began.

Every element in every scene was treated as a separate shape in the same way a watercolour painter might paint individual shapes allowing for unique waterbleed and overlap. Each silhouette was the start of multiple precomps layered together to create the watercolour effect.

Honorable Mention of the Week – howww.com/casestudy/superman/