Illustrations for Shark Trust’s animated video series ‘Shark Shorts’

The Shark Trust’s produced s series of five short animated videos to educate the public about sharks and shark conservation, and what we can do to protect them. 

Freeway Projects was commissioned by the Shark Trust to design and illustrate the graphic elements for the animations, each about 2 minutes long.

We really enjoyed working on this creative project, which consists of five animations called ‘Shark Shorts’. They are viewable at the National Marine Aquarium on digital displays and on the Shark Trust’s website.

Design process

With an audience ranging from 11 and up, animation helps making the topic fun, intersting and memorable. The brief stated the illustrative style to be simple, minimalistic and clean – whilst still being scientific and entertaining, and the personality charactaristics of the lead character to be friendly, fun and engaging.

A storyboard was designed for each video, to visually map out the sequence of key scenes and character actions, helping with the visual understanding and the narrative flow.

As part of the design process, we created an expression sheet, which shows the range of the character’s facial expressions and emotions, helping in conveying the character’s body and personality and making him as noticeable as possible.

Each video has a different set of bespoke illustrations and backdrops to the scenes, all which were made in Adobe Illustrator. Some of the videos feature a mixture of footage and illustrations.