Case Studies

Katherine’s Bicycle

Katherine’s Bicycle is a unique creative content collaboration between Fire Starter Studios and a loving father who wished to animate his daughter’s poem as a special gift.

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Katherine’s Bicycle

Background:

This is an amazing one of a kind project that gave all involved a chance to be creative and have fun like never before.

The client came to us looking to create a high-end animation as a gift for his daughter Katherine for her 11th birthday. Katherine had written this incredible poem about having a magical bicycle.

The father presented us the opportunity to animate and bring to life his daughter’s words.

The poem provided us with a natural outline to follow in creating the bones of this piece.

Our client gave us a lot of leeway as far as fleshing out the beats of the story in a creative, visually engaging way, so there were almost no edits made between the initial board and the final video.

Process:

Because this poem was based around the client’s daughter, he provided us with photographs of her so we could capture her likeness as a cartoon character. We created three options of a cartoon Katherine, two in a light “caricature” style, and a 3rd option which only resembled her in generalized ways and was more whimsical. The client loved the whimsical option and chose it for his video.

For most animated videos, we usually create a full storyboard that looks like a relatively detailed pencil line version of what the final graphics will look like. Because we were planning to incorporate a particularly high level of detail in Katherine’s Bicycle, it made more sense for us to create a VERY rough “doodle board” (like a stick-figure version of a storyboard) along with two completed theme samples for the client to review from the start. Theme samples are like frozen moments in time of the final video, as if it’s been paused on a scene. This way the client had an initial view of the final product, while being able to adequately review his storyline in full via the simple stick figures. This allowed us to focus our full effort on creating extremely lush final graphics.

Of the two theme samples, one was more on the purple side for the night scenes, and the other was more blue. The client chose the blue option.

Once the client signed off on the doodle board and theme sample, we moved straight to creating his full graphics board based on the style of the approved theme sample. In a full graphics board, just as in the theme sample, each scene is represented in its full final art and graphics form as if the video itself has been paused. This gave the client a crystal clear view of what to expect his final video to look like.

The client was so pleased at this stage that he signed off on his full graphics right away and we were ready to move to the final part of the production process. All that’s left at this stage is making the graphics move, aka “animating” them.

And you can enjoy our final results here!

The client and his daughter Katherine were so happy with the result of this high-end animation, he asked Fire Starter to make a second with his daughter Katherine called Freda the Cheetah.

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