James Purdy

As an Editorial Animator for Vice's Snapchat Discover Channel, I was part of a dynamic team of 7-10 individuals. My role involved creating 6-8 ten second looping editorial illustrations daily for abridged versions of articles from various verticals within Vice.

Editorial illustration was an exciting creative realm for me to dig into, especially as I had always struggled at it in art school. I found myself quickly picking it up and becoming efficient at it in the role.

The role was quite fast paced and required a lot of quick abstract thinking around short selections of text.

At the time I was highly interested in developing my 3D animation skillset, but Vice’s brand illustration style guide favored a hand-drawn look.

Viewing this as more of a creative opportunity than a setback, I developed multiple techniques to style 3D animations into a hand-drawn look. All of the animations on this page with people were done in Cinema 4D with effects and settings applied to them in After Effects to create a hand-drawn look. Some of the additional elements (i.e. background scribbles and dots) were created with the Trapcode Particular plugin in AE.

As part of my team I demonstrated initiative by introducing a heavily revamped After Effects template as well as an adjustable "Line Boil" preset, which streamlined the team's workflow, reduced repetitive tasks and number of frames drawn per animation. The line boil preset alone increased our productivity up by at least 2-3x.

Besides automating tedious tasks, I cleaned up the template, nativizing unnecessary pre-rendered animation template videos that took up 225MB of space per template. This reduced our server storage quite a bit as when zipped the new project template folder was 275KB (99.878% decrease in file size).