This is my animated version of a project I started in the School of Motion course “Illustration for Motion” taught by Sarah Beth Morgan and Anne Saint-Louis.

We were provided a brief by a fictional client, who wanted an editorial illustration to accompany an article about digital consumption habits. They shared their initial illustrations, which reflected a more adult and sombre tone. They wanted us to create new illustrations geared toward a younger audience, which would be viewed on mobile devices. These are the original illustrations, by Sara Wong:

From there, I brainstormed a few ideas:

Ultimately, I kept the overall “pool” theme and colour scheme from the original, but iterated to add more vibrancy, and added youthful characters in a style that better reflected the target demographic. And rather than reference the remote control from the original illustration—which implied binge-watching on televisions—I wanted to represent what this audience would be more likely to over-consume: short-form viral videos on platforms such as TikTok.

Our deliverables in the course were finished style frames for the illustration and the title card, seen below. My project was featured on the School of Motion student showcase blog.

After the course, I turned those style frames into this fully animated video. I recreated the characters in Moho, where I then rigged them to bones. To create the digital stream behind them, I used elements from my original illustration, then duplicated them and tiled them into a pattern that could be looped infinitely. I assembled and animated all of that in Moho, then added a few effects to the layers when I composited the illustration in Davinci Resolve.