Jib Jab
Challenge
To create a sharable Ecard that celebrates a specific holiday and create something that will make people laugh.
Pitch
I began by pitching two different directions both with a gag associated with Thanksgiving.
The first direction, Budget Thanksgiving, is Thanksgiving through the lens of a poor college student.
The second direction, Bench Warmer, revolves around the tradition of the fathers of Thanksgiving sitting around watching sports pretending they are a player on that team.
In the end, we decided to move forward with direction one. Budget Thanksgiving. The gag of a misleading turkey being a postcard and the unique perspective of a college student makes this direction a great ecard for Thanksgiving.
Direction 1
Below is the initial thought behind the direction and initial style frame.
Direction 2
Below is the initial thought behind the direction and initial style frame.
Storyboards
Below is the storyboards for the chosen direction Budget Thanksgiving. I created a narrative involving only one character and one setting because the timeline for this piece is 3 weeks. So to make this successful I need to set guidelines to work by.
Development
With this direction, I began by jumping into Cinema 4D to create the background that our character will live within. I am using simple box modeling techniques to quickly get the layout together.
In addition, I will be learning more about the cell shaders in Cinema to get the illustrative look that I want from this set.
I will also roughly render everything and start some cell animating to get some ideas of timing and audio.
Roughly laying out environment with simple models.
After rendering the first pass of the environment I take that into Photoshop and start cell timing.
Went back and made the environment much more organic and doing more poses in Cell to time.
After meeting with my art director we created notes for the piece to help push this further.
These notes included pushing the background design so the form of the furniture matches the shape language of the character and adding more dynamic camera angles instead of the very still straight-on view.
Created different angles for the camera to be at so it is no longer only a straight on approach.
Moving onto the final of the piece I will need to add more moments of pause so that we can appreciate the setup of the environment and the build-up to the gag.
I will need to push the clarity of this character being a student. To do this I am adding elements like books, a backpack, and a school banner. And condensing the info on the postcard at the beginning.
I chose to do cell animating for this piece because the cell has a certain organic look and mood that I think Jib Jab pairs well with and looking at the options for ecards on Jib Jab’s page there is no style like this on there. Both in the look and the movement.
Revamped the background to clarify this is a student. Now going through and finishing all cell drawings.
Budget Thanksgiving
Here is the final Jib jab for Thanksgiving to be shared to all the poor college students out in the world.