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animations & motion graphics

Here are a few client stories I helped bring to life earlier…

Animated picture book…

…telling the tale of the monkey who… er … wanted to be a bear (chapter 1).

I made characters and props out of old packaging, cardboard, balsa wood, congealed paint, sponges on their way to the bin, random bits of fabric, lego wheels etc…

Then I built each stop-motion scene by taking a series of photographs as I moved characters and props around. Photos were cleaned up in Photoshop before being turned into After Effects sequences.

After that, titles and additional effects were added and animated in After Effects, alongside recording the voice-over and creating or sourcing sound and music effects.

(character and scene design & creation, stop-frame & digital animation, voice-over, sound)

Internal comms animations…

…explaining how BFS is making improvements to the lives of their teams, and their customers.

Working alongside Anne-Marie Miller at Carbon Orange, who created the illustrations, I made two animations (one focusing on the customer’s experience, the other on internal systems and processes). What’s shown here is a condensed version combining scenes from both of them.

There was a lot of storyboarding and script development involved – partly to flesh out BFS’s initial concepts, partly to establish exactly what Anne-Marie would need to draw for me to then animate up. The whole intention was to keep things light, engaging and a bit tongue-in-cheek.

(story development, storyboards, digital animation, sound editing & music sourcing)

Music video about holidays … and heartbreak

To illustrate Julie anne McCambridge’s song I drew, painted and cut out characters, scenes and props that tied in precisely with her lyrics, and then filmed or photographed them.

There are some additional After Effects animated elements dropped on top. There was also a lot of painstaking work painting out unwanted bits of background.

(prop and scene design & creation, video, stop-frame & digital animation)

Want a video talking about what you do, but don’t want to be on video yourelf?

Here’s one approach to take.

This little animation sits as part of river-otter.co.uk. To bring the words to life, I illustrated the main gist of them to fit in with the website styling, adding little amusing touches.

(illustration, digital animation, sound editing)

aka “turning a Zoom talk into a standalone animation”

I had static graphics drawn by Anne-Marie Miller at Carbon Orange as a starting-point. And the voice recording of course.

The first step was to pull the recording into Garage Band, and build up loops and sound effects to create the sound track.

Then I turned Anne-Marie’s graphics into animated elements, to keep time with the vocals.

(digital animation, sound editing & sound design)

“Imagine what we can do with graphene (in 50 seconds)”

To create this short animation internal presentation, I started by brainstorming with the Paragraf team about the potential uses of graphene. What came out were implementations around the environment, car batteries, healthcare, space travel.

Those are all referenced in the final animation, show here.

(story, storyboards, illustration, digital animation, sound sourcing)

and here are a few hand-made stop-motion stories of my own…

… plus there’s the one about the time I fell down a manhole

(which inspired a few website-making tips…)

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what clients have said

Andrea

I could eat it! Just look at those backgrounds and colours. I’m going to go up to people in the street and make them look at my website – you’re a genius!
Andrea Constable, Squiggle Social

Anne-Marie

There's a special skill in telling stories, and thinking in terms of time and space. Susie is an absolute whizz at this.
Anne-Marie Miller, Carbon Orange

Stacey

Susie took the time to understand the business and what we needed, and helpfully guided us with site layout and content. We now have exactly what we asked for (and more) thanks to Susie’s hard work and expertise.
Stacey Matthews, cellXica Ltd