This was one of my first ever proper freelance jobs – I can still remember how exciting that was! 

Emotion Works is an educational program provider that aims to teach children all about how emotion works so that they can better understand why things make them feel the way they do. And it was my job to create various teaching aids that would enhance their delivery of this program.

This project was my first foray into 2D character animation (I’d done a fair amount of terrible 3D character animation in Source Filmmaker up to this point). I didn’t really have any idea how to do it, and I’d never heard of Rubberhose or DUIK, so I ended up relying heavily on the Puppet Pin Tool in After Effects. When it works, the puppet pin is great – but so often I found that it’s a fickle tool that can quite quickly do the most unhelpful things; I quickly learned to stay within the narrow confines of what it does well, designing scenes so that that characters would only move in ways that were actually possible for me to animate (a horrible corner to be stuck in as an animator!)

I ended up working with Claire across several projects at Emotion Works – and I even designed a fantastic ‘atomic cog model’ that I thought was super cool, where I reimagined the original Emotion Works Cog Model into a sort of celestial orbit of cogs orbiting cogs. Claire said this was terrible and I was ordered to tone it back by several thousand lightyears (definitely not the last time that a client has ordered this).