OnTopic is a game company and chat app designed to help people stay connected through meaningful conversations, even when apart. This project focused on turning a feature-rich app into dynamic, easy-to-follow videos that showcased the product without feeling like a static walkthrough.
We first created a longer social media video telling the story of three adult women balancing busy lives, kids, and family while still finding ways to stay connected with their friends.To support this narrative, I developed a new set of female characters based on the brand’s existing illustration style. Most assets were built almost from scratch in Illustrator and kept fully vector-based to streamline the animation process. Not all poses and characters made it into the final video, but I’m including them here as part of the development process.
After defining the characters and environments, I added the phone UI, copy, and initial motion ideas to create static screens for approval before moving into animation.
Storytelling played a key role in this project. Since we wanted to showcase the full UI/UX experience, the video naturally became longer, so it was important to keep the narrative engaging to avoid it feeling too heavy.
The final result is a fun and informative video that brings the brand and the app experience to life.
After that, we created additional videos focused on specific app features, always keeping the brand consistent and the tone light and fun.
Character animation was definitely the most time-consuming part of this project, but also the one I enjoyed the most. There’s something kind of magical about bringing an illustration to life, and this was the project where I got to explore that the most so far.
All characters were rigged using Duik Angela, with each body part animated separately to make the movement feel as natural and realistic as possible.
Alongside the character animation, we also developed secondary elements, icons and lettering, to support the overall explanation, keep the story flowing, and highlight key points.
For closing the videos, I felt it was important to create a logo animation for OnTopic. To align with the app’s theme and reinforce the brand’s concept, the idea was to design a shape layer morph where a smile appears inside the chat icon, and then the logo smoothly transitions back to its original form.
It was a pretty challenging project in my career, especially since I was still learning character animation at the time. But it was amazing to deliver a strong result even with a tight deadline and multiple rounds of revisions. Hope you like it!
Client: OnTopic
Agency/Production: Acadia
Creative Director: Brandon Friedman
Director: Joseph Ladd
Account Manager: Clare Walsh
Social Strategists: Rebecca Bailey, Paula Ersly, Keegan Casteel
Traffic Manager: Krista Weingarten
Visual & Motion Designer: Anna Wan Der Maas 🙋♀️
Design Project Manager: Jonathas Vargas
Agency/Production: Acadia
Creative Director: Brandon Friedman
Director: Joseph Ladd
Account Manager: Clare Walsh
Social Strategists: Rebecca Bailey, Paula Ersly, Keegan Casteel
Traffic Manager: Krista Weingarten
Visual & Motion Designer: Anna Wan Der Maas 🙋♀️
Design Project Manager: Jonathas Vargas
