lbella | PSA: Peepy Saving Adventure

PSA: Peepy Saving Adventure

A promotional motion graphic I made for a contest I entered (and won) with my friends.

Back in January 2021, my friends and I entered itemLabel's "Rescue Emerald Peepy" contest that they were hosting at the time. The theme of the contest was to make some kind of creative thing using any kind of media, featuring itemLabel's characters, where the story essentially was to rescue the Emerald Peepy. We could basically make anything we want as long as there was also an image component as the main submission. The winners would then receive a free rare plush toy of the Emerald Peepy in the mail. We decided to make a short video game with a little poster to advertise the game.

Original poster design.

The same poster, but now in motion.

The Game

The story of our game starts with a group of 4 friends hanging out in the courtyard of their school one morning and during the morning announcements they notice that one of their friends, Ema, had disappeared. The rest of the group then goes on a journey exploring the school to try and find their friend.

Each member of the team (there were 3 of us) made up their own itemLabel based character to be one of the main 3 characters.

Sketches of my character, "Leglet."

The Poster

Once we had a story set up for our game I could easily sketch out some ideas for the poster to work as the main submission. I wanted to make it very dynamic, something that shows the main characters on a journey while there's some hint that their friend is captured by the villain in the background.

This became the final version of the static poster, but I suddenly got the idea to make it just a bit more dynamic by adding movement to it.

I went back into the original file, I cut and separated the original image so that way I can move different pieces around using After Effects. I even went ahead to try and have the background swirl around as well. I wanted to make it feel ominous and eerie with slow movements but to also add to the already surreal artwork for this poster.

Then once that was all assembled, I exported it as a gif and submitted it into the contest and one long period of judging later, my team was one of the winners. (There were multiple winners and so many fantastic entries, so the judging period actually took a full month to finally determine the winners.)

While the poster was definitely my biggest priority (it was required), I also helped with the game creation process as well, working on the in-game cutscene, character sprites, and editing.

Motion Graphics

Motion Graphics is the newest of the 4 main skills I work with. However, once I learned the tools to make 2D motion graphics it has quickly become one of my most used skills! If you've looked around at other projects I've featured here on my site, you'll quickly see that I've been able to incorporate some kind of motion graphics almost everywhere.