CASEY'S OFF TO PORTLAND
"CASEY'S OFF TO PORTLAND" is stop motion animated GIF utilizing kinetic type.
This GIF combines sculpted text as well as paper text. The pink letters were sculpted by hand using a material called Free Form Air, and the paper text was made using a Cricut plotter cutter.
AWC STICKER LIBRARY
At the time of posting, this sticker library had generated 27.4 MILLION views!
You can find the whole library by searching "catalystcastle" or "animationwildcard" when you're making an Instagram story. The more they get used, the easier they will be for others to find!
Animation Wild Card (an organization Catalyst Castle helps run) features artists, animated shorts, and behind the scenes on Instagram regularly. We were having trouble finding stickers that matched our posts. During downtime between seasons, we project organizers cooked up a wish list of GIPHY stickers that would be great for promoting the artists in our community, and I got to work making the library!
Tools of the Trade!
Sculpting Away
Priming in the Spray Booth
Sanding! So Much Sanding!
After determining all the words and shapes needed, I designed and printed out scale templates, coved over them with transparent wax paper, and got to sculpting the library (being careful not to duplicate any characters unnecessarily). From there, it was time to sand, prime, sand more, and prime more.
Luckily, we needed to be able to shift the colors in post-production, so keeping the characters the neutral gray of the primer worked out well!
Downshooter on Green Screen
Some of these were really tiny!
I shot on chroma green so it would be easy to separate the characters for the background when it came time to output them as stickers. After shooting in Dragonframe, I brought the files into After Effects and got to work making variations of the stickers.
The sticker library has been great for Animation Wild Card, and it has been even more rewarding to see others using them too. That's the beauty of it! They're available to anyone—just search "catalystcastle" or "animationwildcard" when you're making an Instagram story.
