Hybrid animation / live action projects, and our 2023 Scottish Design Award Gold
At Heehaw there’s nothing we love more than combining all the different talents within our studio into one wild, explosive video - and so it’s the work that combines beautifully shot live action with dynamic, zany animation that gives us the opportunity to flex each and every one of our creative muscles.
How do we do it.
The key with this stuff is to get the animators and illustrators involved as early as possible, so that the live action footage lends itself, in terms of framing, duration, and story, to being remixed, warped and drawn over with anything from scribbled skulls to a fantastical Chinese wonderland.
How? Well, to create the key moments of transition between live action and animation we draw, painstakingly - one frame at a time - frames of animation that introduce animation until it takes over the entire video, before we transition to After Effects for our fully animated scenes. This allows us to take our video work in all sorts of fantastical directions, regardless of budget.
Scottish Design Award success.
Recently we won the 2023 Gold award for Best Animation at the Scottish Design Awards for our international video campaign for Lee Kum Kee. The video opens in live action, where a camera pans across a banquet of food on Chinese New Year. Our protagonist takes a bite, which causes her to embark on a wild adventure through landscapes and scenes inspired by China’s past and present. From bright 3D scenes to delicately animated, painterly Chinese lanterns, each scene was inspired by different elements of Chinese visual culture.
This is just the start of where we want our unique hybrid work to take us. Recent projects have used animation to tell the stories behind athletes from across the world and their struggles with mental health, or elevated the incredible stunt videos from Red Bull’s archives. Get in touch and see what we can do.
