I had the exciting opportunity to work with The Nature Conservancy to illustrate and animate assets for their Nature Lab video series. The Nature Lab is a curriculum platform to help students learn the science behind nature. Their aim with the latest video Virtual Field Trip was to use animated elements to engage their target audience of young children.
Character Design
One of the tasks they assigned to me was the character design of an animated host. The character was to be based on the real-life host of a number of their existing videos. Therefore, it needed to show a likeness to her.
I created a character sheet of different facial features and body styles, and the team at The Nature Conservancy decided on their chosen route.
Chosen Design
Animation
My next challenge was to rig the character in Adobe Character Animator. That was TNC’s preferred software to make it straightforward for their in-house team to animate her for future videos.
I needed to create a mouth rig for the lip sync and keyboard triggers for key poses that would often be used, such as waving and pointing left or right.
Once the Character Animator puppet was rigged and set up correctly, I animated the host within Character Animator for the first video Changing Climate, Changing Cities: Virtual Field Trip from Phoenix to Shenzen.
