The Pack of All Trades

Which animator doesn’t dream of creating their own animated series? This one definitely does. During a brief downtime in between two full-time jobs, I started working on the web series The Pack of All Trades, a sitcom about a group of four anthropomorphic animals living in the big city. It never reached the stage of anything being published, as I don’t want to spend ALL my spare time working, but it was a fun project.

This is a little step-by-step walkthrough of how I brought one of the characters (Sage, a Maine Coone cat) to life.

First, I used the internet as it was originally intended, and looked at cute cat photos, to study Maine Coone cats. I focused on shapes, interesting features and general information about the cat breed to find ideas about how I can bring the character’s personality together with a recognizable Maine Coone cat.

Having gathered valuable insight, I illustrated a preliminary version of the character in Procreate that was going to be the base for her animated self.

After a bit of clean-up of the illustration in Adobe Illustrator and character rigging in Adobe After Effects, Sage was ready to be animated. I am going to spare you the valley girl accent that I used to record some sample sentences for the test animations.

To make the character feel more alive, I focused on secondary animation like a subtle breathing animation and blinking, to compliment the animation of the mouth and arms for verbal and non-verbal communication.

Sage was alive, but she still needed a home. Instead of renting her an apartment, I created a digital one — what with the housing crisis and all. I used a mix of assets I created myself, and ones I found online.

Finally, I placed Sage in her brand-new apartment. And I haven't even heard as much as a “thank you”. You’re welcome, Sage.