The Amazing World of Gumball – Sidekicks of Elmore

Gumball, Darwin and the rest of the Watterson Family aren’t the only characters in Cartoon Network’s Amazing World of Gumball. There’s a whole town full of other characters and with the Sidekicks of Elmore promotional campaign we hoped to maybe introduce to the viewer a few of the other quirky and usual inhabitants.
This 30 second promo is just one of the many elements of the campaign. There are also character bios, web drives, online games and on-air in programme pushes.
I designed and animated all the different sections, originally building the whole thing in Cinema 4D but then having to remake it in After Effects once we learnt we might have to swap out all clips and images depending on what characters we to highlight. It’s now built in a modular fashion so you can easily swap out characters and clips and easily change camera moves to go to different sections.
The school blackboard idea was devised by Producer Dan Smith and is a great way to layout all the many assets of the show, yet still make it fun and bright.
Almost anything could be added to the board from grafitti and splats to pictures, posters and objects.
I used Greyscale Gorilla’s Gorillacam C4D plugin to give the original camera moves a bit more of a human handheld look and I think it work’s great. Originally it also created brilliant focus depth but that meant we couldn’t swap out images so in the end it’s all rendered in focus.