No Characters? No Problem

 

For me personally, character-based illustration, design and animation is where it's at. Injecting that life into characters is both what interests me as an artist and as a consumer. So when the powers that be at Posh Gecko tasked me with doing a more abstract B2B explainer video for Trident Group, the challenge was 'how can I inject life, energy and character into an animation without any characters?'

 

Lucky for me, Trident Group have a great set of brand guidelines, drawing focus with a small set of bold colours against a near-black background with pops of white. Their logo also features a coloured full stop, which gave me the idea to feature dots and circles in Trident's various brand colours streaking forwards throughout the animation acting as a focus or anchor point. This gives a sense of continuity throughout the animation and enables the viewer to follow the narrative in a linear fashion. Such abstract features allowed for a lot of creative scope,  in some sections the dots collide with elements and stroke or colour-fill them, they push icons or burst against them. In sections like the Pacman-esque scene and the mountain climbing scene, the dots are even anthropomorphised to a degree, making the video on the whole a bit more entertaining and personable and satisfying my little obsession with character animation.

 

 

Future projects

 

A far cry from any animation I'd done previously, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this project and how pleased I am with the end result. I'm looking forward to taking on similar projects and straying even further out of my comfort zone in future.

 

 

I'm part of the Posh Gecko team, ownership of this project belongs to Posh Gecko and/or the respective client and has been posted with the relevant permissions.