Phase one
Character system build
Most character work falls apart on the second video. The design was never written down, so the next batch is a re-interpretation, and by the fourth piece your audience is looking at a cousin of the character they met.
The build exists to stop that. It produces an actual artifact — a design, a set of rules, and a production setup — that makes the character reproducible instead of re-drawable. That artifact is what you are buying. The finished content that comes with it is proof the artifact works.
What you get
Every deliverable, spelled out
- Character design, turnarounds, and expression sheets
- The character from every angle it needs to be seen from, and in the range of expressions the content actually calls for. Not one hero pose — the working set an animator would need.
- A locked palette
- Exact values, written down. Colour drift is the failure nobody notices until they put two episodes side by side, and it is the easiest one to prevent.
- A style bible you own
- The rules, in writing: proportions, what the character does and does not do, how the world around them is treated. It is a deliverable rather than a nice-to-have, because it is what lets anyone else pick the character up — including someone who is not me.
- The consistency setup
- The production side of the same problem. The hero character is trained as its own model and held against a written registry of rules, so shot 300 matches shot 3. This is the part that is genuinely hard, and it is the reason the phase exists as its own thing.
- A first batch of finished content
- Typically a 60–90 second piece plus social cuts. It is the demonstration that the system holds, delivered in the formats you need rather than as a technical test.
- Design revisions before anything is animated
- We revise on paper and lock the model sheet only once you are happy. Fixing a character at that stage costs hours; fixing it across finished shots costs weeks.
You own the character, the designs, and everything I deliver.
Fit
When this is right, and when it isn’t
This is for you if
- You have a character already — on a book cover, on packaging, in a logo — and it needs to move.
- You expect to publish with this character repeatedly, not once.
- More than one person or vendor will eventually touch the character.
Don’t buy this if
- You need a single one-off video and will never use the character again. The build is the wrong shape for that, and I will say so.
- Generative AI anywhere in the pipeline is a non-starter for your brand or your audience. That is a legitimate call — I would rather hear it in the first email.
The other half of the offer is episode production. Once the system is built, episodes get faster and cheaper, because the hard part is already done. Sold in batches of four to six, not as a monthly subscription.
Inside a build
How a build runs
One person owns the whole thing, so there is no hand-off friction and no drift between what you approved and what ships. It also means you always know who to email.
- 01
Brief
Who the audience is, what the character has to do, and where the content will run. A short written brief we both sign off on.
- 02
Design & lock
I design the character and world, we revise on paper, and then the model sheet gets locked. Fixing a character here costs hours; fixing it in finished shots costs weeks.
- 03
Animate & score
Animation, voice, and music, with review checkpoints along the way. Nothing ships that I have not watched all the way through.
- 04
Deliver
Final files in the formats you need: landscape, vertical, captions, thumbnails, plus the style bible and source references you own.
Get in touch
Tell me about your character.
If you already have one, send me a picture of it and what you wish you could do with it. If you don’t have one yet, tell me who your audience is.
Either way I’ll come back with a straight answer on scope, cost, and whether I’m the right fit — usually within a day.