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Seasame Street x Netflix
In this client project for Netflix, I created a teaser advertisement animation for Netflix working with another animator together to announce that Sesame Street has found a new home on the platform.
Media: Cinema 4D, NukeX, Adobe After Effects
Research
Sesame Street targets preschoolers (ages 2–5) and their parents or caregivers, who prioritize safe, educational content. Known for promoting literacy, emotional development, and diversity, it’s a trusted brand among families.
In a Netflix advertisement, it's essential to reflect this dual appeal—capturing children’s attention with beloved characters and reassuring adults of the show’s quality. Highlighting Sesame Street’s move to Netflix helps maintain trust, reinforce its legacy, and attract both loyal and new viewers.
Design Approaches Pitch
Design Approach 1
There were 2 design approaches that I pitched to the client in my presentation.
In this first design approach, "Behind the Scenes" , I try to focus mainly on tying the Netflix logo reveal with characters from Seasame Street, and introduce them to the audiences before they enter the plateform.
The biggest challenge was to create a footage with the actual muppet using AI. There are many failed attempts and the final result shown on the right is still lacking some quality motion.
The second approach was 3D based, and combined with cel animation and compositing in 3d. It was called "Just Moved In". This approach intended to highlight the news that Seasame Street has moved in to the big family of Netflix. There would be aminations on the move-in boxes in the empty room depicting the characters from Seasame Street meeting with Netflix. I worked with my teammate Dino Claypoo on this direction which the client picked. I was responsible for the building the 3d scene and doing the composite while Dino was responsible for the cel animation what we would put on the box.
Design Approach 2
Christina Li's contribution to this project
Another pitch was made by the other team member Christina Li, and that would focus on combining Elmo with N logo and creating a new logo reveal. Check out the work by clicking here. Together, our works will create a whole package for promoting Seasame Street on Netflix.
Challenges
One of the challenges is working with a team of three. It is tough especially when one member keeps missing deadlines. Delayed file handoffs slow the entire pipeline, forcing others to wait and disrupting workflow. The lack of reliability reduces efficiency, creates frustration, and makes collaboration harder than it should be. But we had a lot of talks about punctuality, and we gradually figured out more efficient ways to work each other along the way.
Animatic Pass
Revision Pass Composite
The other challenge is technical problems when compositing in NukeX, when I am not familiar with compositing in 3D yet. I had a lot of office hours with my Nuke instructor to help me with file setting up and troubleshooting, I also used ChatGPT when I ran into issues I didn't even understand and let it show me some solutions for them. It was a tough process, but I had a lot of fun learning.
After rendering out the tracked composite animation from Nuke, I used After Effects to add a final touch to it by adding some dust particles and a subtle vignette to fit the narrative-driven "Just Moved In" vibe.
NukeX Compositing
Tracking in 3D can be a bit tricky and there were a lot of roto and tracking needed in the design of the composite. I started from tracking the 3D scene with the camera tracker 3D using .abc files exported from my C4D file. Then I roto-ed the parts that would be visible on the boxes with color managements and matching the lighting and shadows.
Because there were 2 boxes invloved in the the animation, Dino and I decided to create 2 part of animation with one that was just the character walking to the target and the second part where the two characters would meet and draw the N logo together. Matching the 2 animations together was the tricky part; we had multiple versions and the transform node in the Nuke helped lot with matching their size.
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Final Animation with Audio
tbd
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