Recently I had the pleasure of competing in Adobe's Creative Jam at the Adobe's HQ in San Jose, CA, where I took home the award for Best Motion Design! It was an incredibly fun event, and a great chance to meet and compete with local creatives.

 

Adobe sent out the theme, "Light," at 7am and we were given the day to design and build assets to put together a 15-30 second piece live at the 3-hour event. After a day of sweating and working on my carpal tunnel, this is what I came up with:

Before starting, I already knew that I really wanted to do some silly character cel animation in photoshop, because I rarely get to be silly in my professional work and I've been loving animating in Photoshop in my spare time. So, when I recieved the theme, the first thing I did was doodle a little character that I knew that I'd be able to draw and animate fast, because I wasn't going to have a lot of time:

I stayed to simple shapes, as few colors as possible, and arms and legs that could be drawn with a stroke. With that design, I spent the next couple hours trying to think of what I wanted this little guy to do. Once, I had an idea of the simple story in my head, I wrote down all the acting beats I wanted to hit, and recorded the audio for the piece by "acting" out the sound effect with my mouth into my phone, so I would have the timing all worked out. I ended up liking the sound so much, that I kept it in the final version! Here's the "script" I used to record that audio:

With the audio recorded, now around 2pm, I started pencil sketching the animation in Photoshop with the waveform as reference so I could animate straight ahead without having to test out timing at all. By the time I had to pack down and drive down to San Jose from Oakland, I had made it through about 80% of the rough animation. That rough stuff looked like this:

When I sat down at Adobe I immediately dove into finishing up the rough animation and then flew through cleanup and color with no chance for redo's or retrys. Once I had all the colored animation done, I imported it into to after effects to do the lighting effects. The process looked something like this:

And that's it! Big thanks out to Adobe for inviting me to compete and for giving me a snazzy trophy for my efforts! Here's me drinking beer and feverishly drawing: