Working for a holiday club, I was commissioned to animate a five-part miniseries using LittleBigPlanet 3 that would provide humorous video content that was in line with the themes and lessons of each day at the club. The challenge was to write a script for a comedy series that contained those parallels in their morals while still being entertaining for children of Primary School age.

I first created small outlines of episode events and then fleshed them out into full scripts. I got approval from the guys running the club, who played both characters, and we sat down together for a recording session. All audio for all five episodes was recorded in about two hours, following my direction. Most of it was successful, except for some corruption of a few of Pete’s lines in Episode 5, but a backup microphone was on-hand to preserve the recording in those instances.

I’d demonstrated a proof of concept for PB&J prior to starting production, with some natural changes and improvements taking place along the way. I also used the music tools of LittleBigPlanet 3 to compose a jingle that would play at the beginning of every episode. Following having all assets ready, I had the first three episodes animated, recorded and edited in one week, with the remaining two episodes (which each contained a more complex variety of shots), completed within the following few days.

The series was met with a lot of positivity. The kids at the club really enjoyed the slapstick comedy and the club hosts were able to draw moral messaging from each episode in step with their theme. People young and old were excited for each new episode over the course of the week and I still sometimes get asked if there will be more episodes. At the current time of writing this, a Christmas special has recently been completed and will be uploaded soon.

The full series can be watched on my YouTube channel here:

As part of an internship for the YouTube channel SpeakLife, I was tasked with creating an animation that would advertise the latest book of its Director, Glen Scrivener, using LittleBigPlanet 3 to animate and film it.

Originally, I only intended to make a mock-up of Scrivener’s ideas for the sake of helping visualise his initial plan for a more traditional animation. A rougher version of the final animation was made and Scrivener expressed a lot of enthusiasm when I presented it. He then asked me if I’d be willing to make it the final draft and I agreed.

The first draft took about 1-2 days to make and I had saved the assets I used just in case they were needed again, so the following work was easy to begin. Much of the following animation just needed more detailed art assets and a slight change in direction. Scrivener also revised the script, which increased the length of the video. The finalised set of sculpting and shooting done on the game to improve this animation took about 1-2 weeks.

As an Easter Egg, Scrivener’s young daughter was present for the last week of this project and contributed a cat to the last setting of the video.

Following this, I was tasked with the video editing of the project, which included a subtitled version and a search for ideal music to match the project. This took another few days and one delay due to technical issues, but the video was finished on schedule.

The final version can be viewed here: