The Brief
Teaming up with Flogas, off-grid gas suppliers, we embarked on a project to create lively health and safety animation for LPG tank care. Flogas desired a shift from the mundane, opting for a light-hearted, comical touch to make safety guidelines engaging for both their commercial and domestic audiences.
Our Response
Enter Hattie and Chip, a pair of cute little robots, each embodying distinct personas. Hattie, the older, sensible type, and Chip, the exuberant younger counterpart, forms an instantly recognisable, comedy duo dynamic. This creative approach allowed them to seamlessly guide viewers through health and safety animation, where they interact with relatable human characters and scenes which reflect those of the audience.
Our design concept mirrored the familiarity of safety manuals, but with a colourful twist. These safety animations played as if reading from a traditional paper manual, but with the use of motion and plenty of transitions, we were able to make sure it didn’t feel like simply reading off a screen, while still being informative.
Flogas not only praised our approach but also sparked an internal competition to name our charismatic robot protagonists. The animations, designed to engage, educate, and entertain, transforming health and safety into an engaging and memorable way of digesting critical information effectively.
Style Development
Taking Flogas’ need for a simple and digestible style, these were our initial early explorations of the style. These were very stripped down versions of the final style, a lot closer to a traditional instruction manual look with the most minimal detail needed to guide the viewer.
Creative Exploration
Alongside Flogas, we took the initial style and developed it further, incorporating their needs for more detail and colour, and we also explored the concept a lot at this stage too. We needed to work out the role of the robots, how they would interact with the scenes on screen, guide the viewer through the health and safety tips, and how much character animation we would use. All these things to balance while making sure that it remained humorous, light-hearted, yet informative and not too overloaded on the visuals / silliness to find the right level of engagement.
We explored different layouts and scenarios along the theme of the animated instruction manual, picking the right layouts to communicate most effectively and keep things lively.
Character Development
Meet The Robots!Hattie and Chip
The stars of the Flogas animations! These friendly little machines acted as a teaching duo throughout all 3 safety animation videos. Sometimes they would make mistakes and correct each other. Or simply be a guide, or just be silly for silliness’ sake – in small doses! We wanted to make characters that make the viewer smile and keep them engaged through traditionally boring topics.
Storyboard Development
Behind The Scenes: The 2D x 3D Process
We felt 2D animation alone wouldn’t give the robots the amount of expressiveness they needed, so we needed a flexible 3D solution that was easy for any of the team to pick up and use, even if they weren’t a 3D artist. We ended up combining the 3D and 2D process together, building the robots in 3D but then rigging and animating them in 2D, before laying them over the top of our 2D scenes. This allowed us to give the robots a wider range of motion while maintaining the flat 2D look.
What our client Said
“Producing our first ever animated video was a scary proposition and uncharted territory for us as an agency. Working with The Animation Guys they put us at ease, listened to our ideas and made the process come to life. They’re genuinely decent, honest and hard-working people that ultimately produce first-class animation videos. We couldn’t be happier with our final product and no doubt will return to them for a follow up video at some point! Fully recommend.”
Beth Hellowell
Managing Partner @ Signify Digital
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