Devin & the Mystery of the Invasive Silverthorn Shrub

Client | MBS: Full-time employer, subsidiary of Barnes & Noble Education | Marketing Department

Design Problem | Department birthday cards went virtual after the pandemic, and have gotten more and more creative every time. This time, create a virtual birthday card video for the rest of the department to sign for Devin. Make it personal to him. Devin loves cycling, The Raiders, Nike, and his dog Prophet. Devin hates the shrubs in his front yard that keep growing back.

My Role | Design, animation, voice acting, production - everything except writing the story

portrait of coworker, Devin

photo by Daina Faulhaber

🔊Press play and make sure the sound is on!

Inspiration

I knew that this was an ambitious project. The birthday cards are always something done on top of the normal workload, so I decided to save time by animating in the style of traditional paper cutout shadow puppet shows. This allowed me to make the deadline without sacrificing the spooky feeling of the story so graciously written by our copywriter, Liz.

screenshot from youtube video legend of sleepy hollow showing shadow puppet technique

Still from Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Historic Hudson Valley on YouTube

image of shadow puppet show

Shadow Puppet Ramayanam Rama Ravana Yudham at MGU Ktm

Creative Process

I first created my “puppets” as vector art in Adobe Illustrator, being careful to name each layer and group correctly as to import seamlessly into After Effects. Then it was just a matter of building simple animations, recording, and adding subtitles.

screenshot of vectors being made in Adobe Illustrator
screenshot of creating vines vectors in Illustrator for video
Devin's head vector used as "puppet" in video
Devin's arm vector used as part of puppet for video

  • Devin doing Devin. Unbothered. Moisterized. Happy. In his lane. Focused. Flourishing.

  • Chainsaw go brrrrr

  • A heckin' good pupper

  • Well, that escalated quickly.

image of designer thinking or reflecting

Final Thoughts

I only wish I had more time on this one. I believe it was successful, especially for the assignment. Let’s be honest - it was pretty over the top for a department birthday card. But I always want to make something awesome! It was such a blast voice-acting for this as well. I believe the oppurtunity to have other voice actors as well and more time for smoother animations would have done it better justice.

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