Shadows
My role: Creative and art direction, hands-on through production
Situation
Created for Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services, Shadows started with a script that dealt with difficult and emotional experiences honestly. The job was to give that story a visual form that could carry the same weight without getting in its way.
The Challenge
Capturing something deeply human without overcomplicating it and without softening it. The visuals had to be expressive and emotionally direct while serving the pacing and tone of the narrative, and the style had to hold up through the heaviest moments. Restraint was the discipline: every craft decision in service of the story, never the other way around.
What I did
I led creative and art direction and stayed hands-on through the full production: developing the visual style, animating key sequences, shaping the pacing, and handling the music and voiceover mix.
On the technical side, I built the animation workflow itself. The illustrations were rigged with custom controls for facial movement, head turns, and secondary motion like hair dynamics, then animated in After Effects. The pipeline let the animation stay true to the original illustrations while delivering the level of expression the story required, a middle ground between 2D and 3D that keeps the hand-drawn quality alive in motion.
Style frame animation
Organic shapes and patterns are used in conjunction with bespoke illustrations to emphasize the visceral experience of these real life moments.
The sample below is a marriage of stillness and motion.
Character development
The artstyle in this project stands in the middle ground between 2D and 3D animation. It provides a unique feel and texture.
Character animation
To achieve the proposed look as animation, a modified animation pipeline was implemented by introducing a couple new tools. These tools allowed us to create the character animations more efficiently. The illustrations were rigged then imported and animated in After Effects with bespoke controls for facial animation, head turning, and hair dynamics. With this workflow we were able to capture the quality and emotion of the original illustrations.
The result
A piece where direction, craft, and execution work as one thing, and where the strongest compliment available is that you stop noticing the technique. On a story like this, that's the whole job.