2D puppet characters

For the 2D characters that would interact with the 3D furries, I thought the best way to do this was through lineless vector shapes created in Adobe Illustrator. Not only will it save me lots of time from drawing frame-by-frame, but the lineless aesthetic will help the 2D characters blend seamlessly in the 3D cell-shaded world surrounding them.

The three unnamed children characters I created for the documentary consisted of two boys and one girl, each with a distinctive design on them. All body parts of these characters were created on separate layers in Illustrator, then the files were imported into After Effects where each part was parented with altered pivots in order to turn these illustrations manipulative 2D puppets.

One challenge with designing these character was to make sure they aren't derivative from preexisting characters. For example, I initially made the boy with the blue shirt (as seen in test 01 in the video below) a knock-off mix between Tommy Pickles from Rugrats (1991-2004) and Johnny Test from the show of the same name (2005-2014) which was fixed with a change in shirt colour and hair shape. The boy in the orange jacket, however, initially resembled too much of Miguel from Pixar's Coco (2017). This was remedied by changing the jacket's colour from red to orange.

Once constructed and animated, the 2D characters were composited into the 3D footage to satisfactory results. I then proceeded to create and animate clapping hand vectors that would be used for Shot 06.

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