I was entrusted with leading the art direction, concept development, character design, and animation for the global Facebook Groups campaign by 1stAveMachine. Each digital artist was assigned a specific niche Facebook Group to showcase the platform’s power in building communities. I was assigned the QWERTY Group, a queer gaming community.
Working under the key concept of "Super Heroes," we developed characters that blended gaming aesthetics with symbolic values and archetypes from within the queer community.
Some early background explorations. The key message “JOIN THE QUEST” had to be integrated into the environment where the isometric characters would run, shoot, teleport, dance, and try on wearables in a looped in continuous animation.
Each original character design represented a different RPG video game archetype, fused with fashion and color palettes inspired by individual flags from across the LGBTQ+ community.
Each character had a unique animation, with a pipeline optimized for the nature of its motion. Some were fully hand-animated, while others used complex hybrid rigged puppets to balance budget constraints and meet the tight production timeline of the campaign.
Then, they were intertwined and comped into the final background to generate a fully coordinated animation.
Before landing on the final superhero look, we also explored a more animated, Cartoon Network inspired vibe during the initial concept art rounds.
