Sesame Street (mock project)

sesame Street

2023

Design & Animation:

Yuki Li, Yixuan Shi

This is a mock project for Sesame Street, where my task is to create an animated segment. In this project, I combine my knowledge of 2D and 3D animation as well as hand-drawing skills 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.

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 composed the melody for this piece, collaborating with Kelly Warner, who assisted in composing the music and incorporating the actual voices of each animal. This animation aims to educate children about the distinctive sounds made by different animals.

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 created a soft, child-friendly appearance.

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

We utilized Cinema4D to create 3D elements that visualized the sounds made by the animals.

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.