A Twitch streamer by the name of NinjaSquiL reached out to Essence Cartoon to create an alternate version of his ninja squirrel avatar - an Iron-Squirrel. When a new member of the Twitch community subscribes to his channel, a notification pops up on the screen displaying the username of the new subscriber. Twitch allows the streamers to create custom animations and overlays to make their channel unique.

NinjaSquiL wanted to have his ninja avatar “suit-up!” like Ironman, superhero land into the stream, and shoot his hand cannon to reveal the new subscriber.

With a rough layout in mind, it was time to complete the rough animation. For this, I used a 2D animation software called TVPaint where I sketched out the character design, the path of movement, and the overall character performance.

After some discussion, we felt the animation was a bit too short and ended quickly. To solve this issue, we took some inspiration from the man himself, Ironman, and thought “What would Ironman do?…” As it is seen in Iron man, Yeah, I can fly scene, Tony Stark tests out his hand thrusters with a slight hover throughout his garage. We thought this would add a great effect if we had the Iron-Squirrel hover for a few seconds before taking off, screen-right.

Now in full color, including fly-in, superhero land, shooting an acorn subscriber popup, and hover take-off, all this animation needed was some special effects. Special Effects by Malachi Staples, where he added the repulsors effects, landing dust cloud, and sound effects to bring the whole thing together. The new notification was pushed out later that month on NinjaSquiL’s stream.

The client, NinjaSquiL, also wanted to create a final design to put on various items to sell as the channel’s merchandise. For this, we create two full body versions of the Iron-squirrel design; one with mask down, and one with mask open. The final design was created in Adobe Illustrator so the client could scale the vector image to fit his merch without losing quality.