Addam's Family Curtainwarmer

For Thomas More’s production of The Addam’s Family musical, they wanted to create a looping motion graphic to play before the show began to immerse the audience for the show. The idea was to get them fully prepared for the tone and aesthetics of the show while having an unobtrusive animation. I created the concept of this and executed it. I took the characters of the ancestors from the show, which are important background characters that play a large role in the play. The photos surrounding the Addams are their relatives, all from weird and whacky places with very different stories. Their eyes move, looking around at the audience and each other. They all have slightly different personalities to them, still retaining their humanity even in death. Ghostly skulls also appear over their faces on occasion, their apparitions manifest into the physical world.

I began with drawing each individual character - with the exception of the Addam’s Family portrait, which was provided to us by MGM - in Procreate on my iPad. Here you can see what they looked like before being given motion in After Effects. I added their eyes and eyebrows in Illustrator so that I could move them in After Effects, so the finalized Procreate drawings look a bit ghastly without eyes!

I used the website Unsplash to locate high quality images of the various wallpapers, backgrounds, and photo frames used. Beyond that, it was a matter of some photo editing in Photoshop, and animating in After Effects! You can view the full animation here: