Laybuy Mania is a promotional event by Laybuy to engage merchants and customers by putting on 24 hour deals. I was tasked with animating Larry – an illustrated character, and incorporating him into motion design ads for Youtube, Social Media and email.

Choosing the animation

Here are the two finished animation loops.

There were lots of illustrations of Larry to choose from, but realistically i only had time to develop two animations. I opted for a run loop animation as well as a walk loop with a bit of phone interactivity. I felt these two would give me enough versatility to create engaging ads with.

Character Rigging & 3D elements

Using Adobe After Effects and Duik Basel, i was able to rig Larry up to have better control over his movement. This alongside some simple storyboarding, i was able to envision the potential creatives.

The feet added an extra challenge as they were illustrated in a way that meant i had to give perspective and 3D movement to the shoe. As this was a relatively short animation i decided to develop a frame by frame animated front and back foot, and attach it to the rig.

In situ ads

Adding them to different paid and organic channels was really fun! I used a mix of Adobe After Effects and illustrator to bring these final assets to life!

Email and Banner ads

Developing for email and web was a bit harder. These not only had to be engaging and utilise the animation but also be a small enough size not to hinder load times. With GIF file formats big a lossless, i knew i had to limit my colour palette a frames. So i stuck with the original colours from the illustrations, and kept the loops short when developing these ads which meant the file size was under 1mb.