These were our first two kids so I needed to nail the look and energy of both of them. The running in perspective required a lot of guides and pencil tests to build up something that would work.
The turd plop isn't anything fancy, but it's easily my favorite elements. No tricks, just a frame by frame mask animation with a small bounce. The width of the stroke and it's taper were created with Trapcode 3D Stroke. Probably the worst use of any plugin ever.
Harry Potter, John McClane and Buffy each needed a simplified face design that would allow for quick smooshing between each of them on bounce. Lettered catch phrases were then split into layers and quickly scaled in and out.
Originally going for a hand drawn rendering of the four homes we have lived in I opted for a flat vector look to break up the piece stylistically. Keeping everything in the same five color monochromatic palette helped keep things consistent.
Knowing I wanted the action of her pulling him into a kiss informed the rig and character design.