GoNoodle has over 25 original characters that were not specifically designed for animation. And as most of GoNoodle’s content are follow-along dance videos, my task was to figure out how to animate different characters to choreographed dance sequences. And I had to do it all solo within tight budgets and deadlines.

Each video had a brief, a list of characters to be featured in the video, and often a video of a choreographed dance for reference.

The first step was always to storyboard each video. This helped rough out the key poses for each dance or exercise. The next step was to take the key poses from the storyboards and sync them to the audio to check the timing. This is where I would look for repeated poses and motion to save time.

Once the timing was set, I would build hybrid character rigs based on common poses, match them to the key poses, animate the in-betweens, clean up the motion, and finally animate the lip sync for each characters dialogue and / or lyrics.

As with the games I helped build for GoNoodle, feedback from teachers about our animated videos was overwhelmingly positive. GoNoodle has been used by over 14 million students and has been used in 4 out of 5 public classrooms in the US. Our animated videos on YouTube have accumulated around 50 million total views.

• Character designs: Characters destined for animation need to be designed specifically for animation and references need to be created to help animators understand how each character should be rendered in various poses, angles, and emotions.
• Time equals quality: No matter how many efficiencies I found, animation is a time and labor intensive medium where every shortcut results in a lower quality result.