Netflix Cultural Moments: Chinese New Year

The Brief

Netflix wanted a beautiful illustrated banner for their Cultural Moments series, specifically to commemorate the Chinese Lunar New Year. This existed as a banner on Netflix’s homepage in specific regions.

Process

As animators, it was up to Filipe Consoni and I to make the elements of the illustration move elegantly. We were directed to not go overboard with the animation: to let the illustration breathe and be more subtle.

The biggest challenge of this piece was to keep the stylistic integrity of the stunning original design (by Haeri Cho) while also pushing the rasterized artwork as much as possible. When I saw the illustration for the first time, I knew that this was going to be special.

Animation

Filipe and I split up the illustration by each element. We were able to divide and conquer. I jumped at the chance to animate the characters (the people watching fireworks, tiger), and also got to use some really cool pseudo 3D on the pastries, snacks, coins, soup, dumpling, and chopsticks. Here is a collection of the individual elements I animated:

Credits

Client: Netflix

Design: Haeri Cho

Art Direction: Shannon Rollins and Hyung Soon Joo

AE Animation: Filipe Consoni and Nicole Pappas

Cel Animation: Daiqi Cui, Nick Knezevich, Matt Deans