Cobra Creative produced a series of animated shorts for History Channel’s relaunch of the channel’s online presence, History.com

The idea was to provide viewers with an unexpected, entertaining look at key moments in history.

The concept for these videos, which were concepted at Campcreative.com, was "Chalk Talk" – The “Talk” is a phone interview with certain historians about a key moment in history. The “Chalk” are blackboard style illustrations. The animated blackboard illustrations were intended to be fun, quirky, in some places raw, in other places polished. The audio VO was edited to be short, to the point, and revelatory. Each episode has a “who knew” moment.

Technically, these videos were illustrated in Photoshop and animated in After Effects. The Video Gogh plugin by Re:Flex created the chalk effects. The ghosting effect was created with this plugin, time distorts and some custom expressions. We used Cinema 4D lightly when the script called for a rotating model, but we tried to limit our use of Motion Graphic cliches and really emulate the look of stop motion chalk animations. We also took a strong role in concepting the imagery to work with the motion and to illuminate the idea.

Colin Evoy Sebestyen
@colin_movecraft
colin@movecraft.com

Lead: Jake Hawley
Character Animation: Feras Khagani
Illustration: Jason Csizmadi
Art Direction: Michael Cobra
Concepting: Camp Creative
Historian: Justin Bates