During 2018-2019, Google Play carried out a series of emails promoting new and trending games on the Play Store. Our job was to create engaging emails, and specifically engaging email hero gifs, for Google's customers.

We decided we wanted to use characters in many of the animations. We had limited time and budget. We also hadn't completed many character animations in past projects. We were able to overcome these obsticals with beauitful illustrations, innovative rigs, and building a great team that worked together to come up with good solutions.

This animation was a lot of fun. We were getting in to the grove with characters. And this animation allowed us to experiment with facial expressions, and making the character more relatable. It was a big challenge getting the physics of the spinning sonic zoom. The leaves, and the maze grounded the animation.

This animation was made during the release of a Star Wars movie. In the original design, the shapes were 2D, which is typically Google Play’s brand. I felt the ships would be much more interesting if they were in 3D. I was able to model and animate the ships in Cinema 4D and use a toon shader to maintain the flat colors, but also add some physics to the ships.

As we were making more character animations, I needed a way to quickly and efficiently rig characters. Plug-ins like duik were clunky to use. Pasting custom IK code in each limb was effective, but time consuming. So I developed a script to input the custom IK scripts in to shape layers, based on the layer name, to quickly and effectively rig characters with a lightweight rig.

With Animations like this, the illustration did a lot of the heavy lifting. Dustin me David was a great illustrator.