An animated series that helps pre-school children learn English as a foreign language.
Client: New Oriental
Bobo English is a new app created by our friends Prismo Studio for the Chinese private education market, aimed at teaching young children English. Born from the 2020 pandemic and the inability of New Oriental to teach in person, they recognised the need to create a product that could be used in peoples homes without direct teacher intervention. And so Bobo, conceived and created by Prismo Studio, was born.
The idea is simple, fun and immediately engaging. Bobo is an Alien who has landed on Earth. He befriends a family who, through a series of animations and interactive games [not created by ticktockrobot], learns about the new world around him in English.
We were tasked with creating a series of fun music and live action videos that entertain as well as re-enforce the children’s learning for each week.
The size, scale and production timeline of this project is the largest we have ever undertaken.
Hundreds of 1 -2 min music videos and 3 – 4 min live action videos were produced in total, within just under 2 years. Yep, you read that correct.
We have developed a close working relationship with our partners Prismo studio, who provided us with the required music and live action footage for us to create our very stylised animations. Scripts and language goals were developed by the client which we then adapt into fun quirky music videos.
We also created various other assets including posters, stickers and obj posed models for a 4 ft model that adorns the Bobo office reception in China.
It was also a great project to road test our new, bespoke project tracker, which has been a god send in organising such a mammoth and ever-growing project.
Credits: |
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Bobo Character Design: |
Joey Li / Prismo Studio |
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Creative Direction: |
Simon Armstrong |
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Design & Direction: |
Simon Armstrong, Joao Rocha & Matt Whitehead |
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Scripts: |
New Oriental |
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Audio & Live Action: |
Prismo Studio |
Services:
- Additional Character Design
- Art Direction
- Storyboarding
- Animation
- Editing
- Social Media Re-versioning
It takes a library to make a library...
With just under two years to create hundreds of animations, we knew we needed to find great solutions that would enable us to produce quality quickly. Fortunately a challenge is something we like here at ticktock.
If we were going to make a huge collection of videos, we were going to need a large assemblage of cute, quirky animations that could be sewn into our bespoke shots. Using Maya’s Studio Library plugin, James our animation lead set about crafting a myriad of loop, idles, actions and poses that would speed up the animation process.
This little loop here took 10 minutes to create thanks to James' hard
work at the start of the project!
What was paramount is variety in colour and character to prevent monotony..
Some stills from the Live Action series we post produced.
