In early 2020 I was approached by LiveWire Sport and asked if I would be interested in animating for Channel 4 as part of their Paralympic social media coverage. Of course I jumped at this opportunity - My two favourite things rolled into one!
I thought it would be interesting to take you through the process of how that went. Due to covid there was a fair amount of stopping and starting, there was a chance the Paralympics might be cancelled all together! Luckily they were not, and I was able to both animate, and compete in Tokyo.
This is where I started - with a very simple animatic. I sent this to the client and they were happy with me to start animating properly with this as a guide. The final animation ended up being nearly double the length of the animatic but has pretty much all the same elements of movement.
Above shows the finished line work for the animation. In order for it work on instagram I initially animated in a square format. However I did end up reformatting it twice - so it worked in a 16:9 widescreen format as well as a 9:16
This is the colour test image I started with. It was decided quite early on that the main colours would be red, white and blue (the colours of the GB flag). The background colour was down to channel 4 as it had to match with the rest of the social media theme.
This is the final colour version (with no sound).
I am not a sound designer so was really excited that LiveWire Sport found someone to do that. Here is a link to the full version that was released on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/CS91CfeIOH1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link and Twitter https://twitter.com/C4Paralympics/status/1430186635979894792
This animation also aired on TV which I was not expecting and was such an amazing surprise! I didn’t perform in my 100m final as well as I would have hoped but the fact I got to do this animation made me feel so much better about 2020 and 2021 as a whole.