Mighty — Character Animation for a Website Rebrand

Mighty / Website rebrand / 2022

One cast, many loops.

My role: Character design cleanup, rigging and animation, Lottie export

Delivered: Looping Lottie character scenes for the website, reusable character rigs, and square and landscape social posts

Tools: Illustrator, After Effects, Duik, Joysticks 'n Sliders, Bodymovin (Lottie)

The brief

Mighty, a technology company working in personal injury, was redesigning its website and wanted illustrated characters that could live across the new pages as small looping animations. The characters had to come from Mighty's own illustration style and stay consistent from scene to scene.

The build

I prepared the illustrations in Illustrator, rigged each character in After Effects with Duik and Joysticks 'n Sliders, and built the scenes from those rigs: a painter on a six-second loop, a juggler, a girl with a bucket, a phone guy, a guy with a laptop rolling his eyes, a hand-pistols gesture, a medical scene, scales of justice, a scrolling sign and an office scene. Each scene was exported to Lottie with an HTML preview for review. From the same rigs I made 10-second social posts in 1080x1080 for Instagram and 1200x628 for LinkedIn.

The constraint

Lottie does not play IK rigs, so a Duik rig can't be exported as it is. I baked the IK to keyframes before export, testing the baked rig against a straight Bodymovin export first, so the loops could ship as vector Lottie files.

The delivered experience

Nine of the scenes were published on my portfolio as Lottie files in January 2023: the painter loop, scales of justice, the juggler, the office, the medical scene, the scroll sign, the laptop guy, the bucket girl and the hand-pistols guy. The social posts were rendered in July 2022.

Client feedback

"Ilya was fast, reliable, and became a part of our team while he worked with us. Went above and beyond. Highly recommend."

Josh Schwadron, Mighty