I came on-board a collaboration between Nike and Tastemade late in the development of the planned animated series ‘Instant Expert’. The idea of the video series was that Nike affiliated experts in various fields would explain in voice over different aspects of health and wellness that might not be obvious in the development of an athlete (or a person trying to live healthier). Animation would support the VO and help bridge the gap visually for more abstract concepts that might be hard to convey with ‘shot/real life’ video.
Below is a hand drawn animatic I generated to match the VO to the on-screen action and help refine the timing with Nike.
The actual animation was me with two additional animators brought on to support, the phase of character and look design ran so long that the actual animation of the 2:45 video probably ended up taking about 5-6 weeks of stop and start animation, with a 2 week period of revision at the end.
Nike was very specific in their desire to have a central character that wouldn’t read as a single/specific gender/ethnicity/age, which… made designing the look and feel a fairly involved process. There was a lot of back and forth and the evolution of the look is pretty evident in some of the design work here.
All in all the majority of time on this project was probably a back and forth with the client on refining this look…
While refining the look of the characters and how directly their illustrated clothes would be recognizably Nike athleisure lines, we decided that each of the three planned videos would feature a recognizably distinct body type. Character designs from this point on were built to work across Mesomorphic, Endomorphic, and Ectomorphic versions.