To This Day Project

The amazing folks at Giant Ant brought together a group of animators to lend their unique styles to short sections of a poem about the devastating effects of bullying. This was my first attempt at cel animation, and I learned a tremendous amount from screwing up so much.

Around the time Giant Ant announced the To This Day project I had been experimenting with some hand drawn animation but had yet to find a project with the adequate time for workflow experimentation and the stylistic freedom to not know what I was doing. The cause was worthwhile and it seemed like a lot of fun.

Everything was drawn in Photoshop and composited, color corrected and finished in After Effects. For elements that needed to retain form and rotate in the wide perspective (bouncing cube, extruded question mark, house, grandma's arm) reference elements were prevised in AE before working out pencils.

Many character ideas were explored but were eventually simplified to keep everything floating center screen.

It was a huge honor to be a part of such a great project with so many great animators. This thing took off and got millions and millions of views on YouTube and ended up as a TED talk.

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