Beefeater: World Gin Day
Motion Design
Beefeater gin celebrated World Gin Day with a series of illustrations. I worked on the animation for these illustrations.
First Post
The mascot was the face of the service design project and needed to be accessible to the rural masses. I was given the brief of creating someone that pregnant women would look up to but shouldn't be their direct relative. Also the mascot needed to be adaptable to the various cultures one finds across India.
I created a look board of visuals that would work according to the brief. They were heavily inspired from illustrations in school text books as these are more accessible and legible.
Character Design
As a team of two me and my co-designer started work on this mascot that would capture the essence of "Uma". My initial explorations were very realistic but based on feedback I simplified the design to lesser lines that would convey the same message.
This was closer to the design that we finalised, I wanted the mascot to have a clothing universal across India, so I chose a Sari. The texture of the Sari could be adapted based on the region we were working for.
Once we finalised the mascot we tried different combinations of accessories to fix the final look.
Initial Script
Like all video projects, I requested the team to follow the Script, Visual and Asset Grid for the entire video. This tool helps in multiple fronts from locking down the timing and the number of assets that need to be created to also acting like a screenplay before we begin the process of putting down visuals.
The team was parallely exploring backgrounds for the video.
Storyboard
We built a basic 4 panel comic script initially in the process to test out characters and backgrounds.
Asset Building
Once we had the list of assets, the team started creating them while I worked on the mascot. To have a smooth transition into animation we needed to convert the mascot from raster to a vector image in T-pose which would be easier to rig later.
Rig construction for Uma Didi and T-pose character for animation
Other assets required for the video created by the team.
Animation
The animation process started with building out character rigs for Uma Didi. These were essentially digital puppets that could be animated later. It was essential to keep these rigs simple yet flexible so that people with a very basic knowledge of the software could also animate them.
One could manipulate hands, shoulders and waist etc with simple sliders and key frame the poses. For the mouth I added different mouth shapes which could be animated as hold frames to mimmic the exact sentence that was required.
To break down the animation process, I started with just the key poses based on the audio.
This was then smoothed out with animation graphs and secondary motion of the hair was added.
Finally the facial animation along with the syncing of the mouth shapes brought the mascot to life.
Below is the second video in the series.
Awards and Recognition
The UMA Project was widely recognised for the value it brought to the issues of maternal health in rural India and these are some of the awards the project won in 2021 and 2022. The team was invited to present at the 32nd World Design Assembly by the World Design Organization.
Although it was a core service design project, it gave me an amazing opportunity to use my skills as a visual designer.
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