sesame Street
2023
Design & Animation: Yuki Li, Yixuan Shi
Create an animated segment for Sesame Street. This project will combine all your knowledge of 2D and 3D animation as well as the hand skills learned in Animation Techniques to create a whimsical, tactile, and fun animation.
Research
Sesame Street is an American educational children's television series that combines live-action, sketch comedy, animation, and puppetry.
It has designed many cute characters and uses a lot of vibrant colors, making its animations popular among children.
References from Pinterest
Pitch directions
The first direction focuses on the hand-made feeling. The plants around the animal are made of felt; the rock uses using crayon texture.
For the second direction, the background is a live photo scene, the bird’s body is in 3D, the rest of the body is 2D painting, and the leaves are made from color cardstock.
Concept
Educate children about the animals that make sounds in the forest, such as caterpillars, frogs, and woodpeckers. Each animal will be placed in a small environment. Along with the song, animal sounds will appear like drum beats.
Behind the Scene
We used wool felt, cardboard, and clay to build different environments in the forest. For example, felt is for flowers and trees; cardboard is for soil; clay is for smaller elements, like frog’s blush.
Music + Sound effect
I created the melody for this piece, and Kelly Warner helped us compose the music and add the real voice of each animal so that this animation can educate children about what each animal's voice sounds like.
Mixed Media
Hand drawn animation
For the caterpillar, frog, snake, and bee animations, we chose to use the hand drawing skill with 12 fps. This low frame rate hand-drawn animation will look more dynamic. Also, the rough-edged shapes look very soft and child-friendly.
Stop motion
When I was in kindergarten, I often played colorful clay in craft classes. To make the visual images more interesting, we tried stop-motion animation for the trees, frog’s blush, and soil.
3D animation
White pieces represent “others”, and black pieces represents “yourself”. The animation of these pieces symbolizes the mind game between the two players.
2D animation
The animation of the woodpecker was made by the shape layer in AE. When it is pecking the wood, the shape layer can make very exaggerated deformations.
Live action
This ripple video was used in the frog scene. It is very subtle and can show the slow flow of the water.
first pass
The first pass’s challenge is to combine different unique shapes with vibrant color palettes.
In order to make a unique and cute design, I tried the crayon texture and also added 2D lines on the felt texture.
Notes: The style is approved, but we should work more on the story. In each environment, the animation should have a narrative feeling, and the sounds of the animals need to be real sounds in the forest.
Second pass
For the second pass, I made animations for the caterpillar and woodpecker, but they were not exaggerated enough.
Notes: The new styleframes have no sense of depth. There are no overlaps between elements, so each animal seems isolated from the environment. Add more foreground and background elements.
Create fun animations by using animation principles.
Make the sound effects louder.
Third pass
Based on the previous design, we finished the remaining styleframes. With the art director's suggestion, we refined or redone the animal animations to make them look fun enough to make the audience laugh. Also, we changed our title from “Forest Choir” to “Forest Symphony” because the word symphony means harmony of sound, and they are making sounds instead of singing.
