Pull your craziest face & help children in war zones
Children from conflict areas often have difficulties recognising and expressing their emotions. Platform ‘Crazy Faces’ helped them by letting them play a game of pulling faces with Dutch kids. Proving that emotions are universal, regardless of living standards, culture, health or wealth.
Bringing Smiley to life
Meet your competitor Smiley. Can you mimic his 4 emotions as fast as possible?
My starting point was a (static) design of the emotions happy, angry, sad, suprised. To get the look and feel I first created animations with aftereffects. The second step was to convert these sequences in code (AS3) so we could trigger them instantly and transform them into the next as smooth as possible.
Website flow
Real time face distortion
We didn't stop with creating coded 2D character animations. To stimulate the children even more, we wanted to use realtime face distortion that would perfectly match Smileys expression. Our starting point was the webcam together with face recognition software.
Also here I first animated it in after effects. Technically it was a big challenge to transform these morphs into dynamic files. With a tool that uses colours to blow up, shrink, or reposition I recreated my morphs as you can see below.
Live event
To kick of this campaign we converted two classic photo booths into a Crazy Faces booth. Placing one of them in The Netherlands and the other in Palestina so the kids could have a live and realtime battle of pulling crazy faces.
Like the classic Photo Booth your result was printed on paper. Only this time we created high res photo's which we turned into an exhibition which was presented in the Eye in Amsterdam and later on in Breda.
The site became Site of the Day on 8 June 2014.
Project Specifications
Client Warchild & Right To Play
Date April 2014
My Part gameplay, character animation and interface
Concept ACHTUNG!
Frontend Superhero Cheesecake
Audio Big Orange
