Bringing the poster to life
A short animation bringing the artwork of James Daw to life
I was stoked when I was approached about animating the Campaign poster for SEA7 Ocean Activist Camp hosted by Finisterre.
The surreal, symbolic design by James Daw was already packed with great textures and line work, my challenge was to bring it to life without losing its flavour.
I wanted to enhance the weirdness without making it goofy, so subtle, floaty movements felt right. I wanted to give it the feeling of it being underwater, so motions needed more resistance as if the forces of water were pushing back on everything.
The biggest technical hurdle was rebuilding the illustration from a flattened image. I needed to redraw parts of it so I could rig it in Moho Animation Software without losing any of the original style. Luckily, Moho has a beautiful suite of tools to allow for rigging and animating things that really lean into that hand-drawn style.
Animating someone else’s work is always a fun challenge. This piece of art was not supplied with animation in mind, but part of the fun was breaking it down into separate sections and working out how everything was going to come together and move as a cohesive piece.
This one was a load of fun to animate, any excuse to get a bit weird with animation, I’m all for (plus bonus points for some activism!)
