With Hiili being a well established character in both illustration and animation form, we had a blast exploring creative ways to evolve it further while still maintaining its charm.

The client wished to give Hiili more things to do than in their previous campaigns. Hiili was to be more interactive, and support the copywriting in fun visual gags that would catch the viewer's attention fast for the short duration.

K-Ryhmä's team provided scripts for each film, thoughts about what Hiili's actions would be, and what message they wished to present to their consumers. Calico was in charge of how it would all come together on screen via animation.

Animation director Laura Jay made rough storyboards to first illustrate the client's script, and provided solutions on how to set the scene simply and efficiently in favour of Hiili's character acting. 

We wanted to respect the original illustrations as well as the previous iterations of Hiili while making its character design slightly more streamlined. We used Toon Boom Harmony to explore different textures and line weights to soften the “fur” of Hiili’s abstract charcoal-y body.

With Laura's character research and storyboards, animator Myra Hild was ready to bring Hiili to life. Myra brought a sense of whimsy through delicate nuances in her animation style that embraced the character’s lively personality.

The finished character animations were designed to fit within a square shape in order to be easily composited within different layouts and social media formats.