Sesame Street
The Food Chain
The Challenge
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 for one of the world’s most successful franchises.
Research
Sesame Street is an American educational children's television series that combines live action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry.
The Food Chain
An ancient Pond!
Plants - Worm - Bird - Sun - Plants
Design Approaches
Approaches 1: puppet theater, 2.5D
Approaches 2: claymation, 3D
Styleframes
Workflow
AI Tools: Midjourney, Upscayl
Basic idea: Midjourney to generate images, Upscayl to zoom in to get a clearer picture of the generated images, Photoshop for adjustment, animation in After Effect.
While it wasn't terribly difficult to generate some images of lotus leaves using midjourney, I made many attempts to generate a suitable pose for the frog. Just like human fingers, AI has a hard time dealing with frog fingers.
Based on the frog picture generated in midjourney, I did the frog jumping action frame by frame in Photoshop, added some filters to them, then put the whole sequence into After Effect.
In the first pass, I made the splash like a big wave to match the Japanese Ukiyo-e style, which is just too much for a pond. So in later versions, I made it look more like a splash.
After modifications to the animation, I have these three versions of the splash. Eventually, my art director picked the blue one because of its strangest sense of water.
On the one hand, I framed them in order to make them more relevant to the format of traditional Japanese painting. Because they are written from top to bottom, I also made a lot of attempts at vertical typography to make it easier to read.
However, the length of the animation makes it still very difficult to read. So considering the client's linguistic requirements, I went for a horizontal layout. This allows one to not miss the animated content while still being able to read the text.
