Chicken Fruit have been lucky enough to work on several short animations in the fun, colourful and explosive worlds of comic artist and children’s author Jamie Smart.
Our first project with Jamie was a video to reveal his card game Hero Slam.
Jamie storyboarded an idea of what he imagined the video to be, provided the artwork for each scene, and we adapted it as faithfully as we could, separating his artwork into layers and using a combination of 2.5D, 3D and traditional hand-drawn animation to add simple motion to each scene.
We once again collaborated with Reeder, who made the ear-wormy music and sound mix.
Our second project dived into the world of Flember.
Jamie and the team at David Fickling Books wanted us to create a simple but adventurous cover reveal for the series finale.
We pitched several different ideas – the winning concept shows a beating golden heart that explodes with energy into the two main characters as they appear on the cover. We included a simple camera movement to add a parallax effect to the incredible cover artwork using 2.5D animation.
We’ve followed Jamie’s work for long enough that we saw the first sketches of what would become Flember many, many years ago – so it felt pretty special to be involved in the series even in a small way.
After our work on the Flember trailer, we were also asked to make something for the release of the 11th book in the multi-million-selling Bunny vs Monkey series: Intergalactic Monkey Business.
Once again, we pitched a few ideas to the team; the one they chose starts in the familiar forest setting of previous BvM stories, but features a huge zoom out into outer space, where our warring characters are sucked into a black hole.
We made several variations of this trailer to include the Waterstones special editions of the books (Team Bunny or Team Monkey – we’re Team Monkey).
… he’s an embarrassingly big fan of Jamie Smart.
He’s been reading Jamie’s comics since issue 1 of Bear was released with SLG when he was in art college in the mid-00s.
Every Chicken Fruit project has been overseen by a Looshkin stuffed toy and Chaffy vinyl, which sit on the shelf above Jonny’s desk. Jonny’s early sketchbooks are packed with artwork influenced by Jamie – and Jamie’s work probably continues to influence Chicken Fruit’s art style today.
Jamie, for his part, has been extremely gracious towards this little fanboy following him around the internet for literal decades (pictured: a bit of Jamie Smart artwork commissioned for Jonny as a birthday present in 2011).
So when that initial email from Jamie landed in our inbox about working together on the Hero Slam animation, it was a pretty nice feeling. They say never meet your heroes, but each of these collaborations with Jamie has been such good fun. Thank you for trusting us with your worlds, Jamie!
