It All Starts with a Seed: New Illustrated Animation Project with Simple Mills!
Hi friends!
I have been sitting on juicy news for quite some time, but now I am so excited to be able to share one of my biggest projects to date! This past March/April, I was asked to create an illustrated video promoting Simple Mills’ new organic seed crackers. The slogan for their campaign is “Power to the Seed,” and so they wanted a video to follow a single seed that falls into soil, roots down, and eventually grows into their new product box!
The Process
To be honest, I was intimidated at first. I’ve never made such a complex and long animation before. BUT, I understood the building blocks and knew that I could handle it…it would just take a good amount of time!
To kick off the project, we had a call to go over ideas, aesthetic, and all other pertinent information needed before I brought pencil to paper. Then I brainstormed for a bit and started sketching the frames so they could get a general idea of the flow of the video.
I then sent over a PDF with all the black and white frames (see right for a few of those frames), so that I could get final approval on the direction of the video and start illustrating with color! The color palette they provided was very cheerful and bright, so I was excited to move forward with more refined illustrations.
Then it really started getting fun! I began illustrating with color, while adding subtle shadows and highlights. After the Simple Mills team approved the colors in the new set of frames provided (left), I went on to the next and most time-consuming step!
The most tedious part of the process had to be drawing each frame with tiny, incremental changes to make the seed look like it’s growing into the final plant. So lots of small adjustments were made in Procreate on my iPad and Photoshop on my computer, over and over, using the “slide animation” function. The watering can dips in a circular fashion, water drips and the soil gets soaked, roots slowly dove deeper and wider in the soil…I even worked in tiny butterfly wing flaps! By the end, I wound up with 42 individual illustration frames in Photoshop. And it was a ginormous file size to boot.
From there, I exported all frames as an MP4 for social media (since Instagram plays videos on loop) and GIF for email and websites. And there you have it, folks! I really enjoyed seeing these illustrations come to life, and I hope to have more opportunities to create animations for individuals and brands I can stand behind!
Have any of you seen these new Simple Mills Organic Seed Crackers in stores or have you had a taste yet? So crunchy and good! And I love that they’re made with just a few, real ingredients, with regenerative agriculture principles in mind.
P.S.
If you’re interested in learning how to turn your illustrations into animations, I highly recommend Libby VanderPloeg’s class on Skillshare! That’s where I learned each step of the process!