Project overview
Take It Easy is an animated greeting card lasting around ten seconds. A girl begins by working on her laptop from a beanbag chair, becoming more tense as she continues to type. A small black cat at the window first watches a bird, then turns, jumps into her arms and rubs its head against her face. She finally pauses and smiles as a simple message appears on screen: Take it easy!
It is a small everyday moment, but it uses a specific action to express the idea of taking a break. Rather than delivering advice, companionship naturally interrupts the pressure.
Storyboard and rhythm
The early storyboard uses close-ups of legs and facial expression to establish the work state, then a wider view at the window to place the cat, bird and room in relation to one another. After the cat jumps into her arms, the camera moves to the girl's point of view and finishes on the laptop notification.
Within the short duration, typing, the bird flying away, the cat's purr and the notification each sit on an action beat. Sound helps carry transitions and emotional changes rather than simply becoming a continuous background track.
Hand-drawn production
The animation was drawn frame by frame in Procreate, using soft linework, muted warm colour and very little shading. Around sixty key drawings were completed by hand, with some in-betweens and final compositing adjusted in After Effects to keep the handmade quality while smoothing the movement.
The course leaned more towards puppet animation, but I chose to keep practising frame-by-frame work. That meant finding additional resources, and it gave me a more direct understanding of how anticipation, follow-through and squash and stretch shape character performance.