Smencils

Branded social mascot using motion-capture animation

With a goal of reviving a 20 year old legacy brand on social media, I decided to develop a character that can be deployed on short form platforms like TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Instagram reels. This allowed for a flexible and recognizeable way for the Smencils brand to be visible in a variety of playful trends. Within a couple months, the character’s posts started attracting millions of views on TikTok and became the main representation of the brand on social media.

Creative Process: the base of the character is a reference to the most recognizable display packaging for Smencils - the cylinder container has been used for fundraising in schools for decades. Because I would be using motion capture for much of the animations, I needed to make sure the final character was a humanoid in form with 2 arms and 2 legs. The head of the character would be represented by the tops of the pencils sticking out of the display which becomes apparent when animated.

Tools: Blender (sculpting, rigging, animation, render), Mixamo (mocap libraries), Wonder Studio (generates mocap data from my own video sources), Premiere / After Effects (compositing and edit)