Note: some of the videos made have been used in an app and aren’t directly available on the open internet however select elements and clips have been used here with the charity’s permission, for which I am very grateful.

I was lucky to work as a technical director, producer and animation lead on a substantial project for charity For Baby’s Sake for the first half of 2021. Project had around 100 deliverables, including hero films, social content and even Lottie animation for app use. The most sensible thing I could do to help the team reach a key deadline at the end of April for the main films was to fix down our cast of characters and crucially create some rigs to speed up the animation process.

There were about 10 artists working on the project, with at least five animators at any one time. Not everyone had worked with rigs, so whether that was the illustrator creating the characters or some of the animators that has more traditional hand drawn approach, it was going to need clear guidance on how these were designed for and animated. A rig, for the benefit of readers outside of the animation world, is like creating a mechanism that can connect multiple components and their movements together. Imagine you're moving an arm - you just want to think about waving that hand, not thinking about every last angle each part from wrist to shoulder should be at - and that’s why you rig.

The charity works around matters relating to domestic abuse, so the tone and style had to reflect that and couldn’t be cutesy. We did need a sense of feelings, so facial rigging was needed on all characters. To allow for turnaround time, we decided early on that we couldn’t have characters talking and that there would be a limited number of angles the characters and head directions would have. This meant we also had a cutout or replacement style for things like the mouths, and despite the limits of these choices in practice the animators were able to have us really feel the emotions of these characters, often in challenging scenarios.