Character bible first
Turnarounds, expression sheets, a rig-friendly construction grid and a short list of poses that are always on-model. Everything downstream referenced it.
Edna Bulgarka
A folklore-rooted character brought into a modern 2D system that could carry a whole season of shorts without redrawing itself every time.
Client
Edna Bulgarka
Year
2025
Our role
Concept, character design, 2D animation
Deliverables
Character bible, 3 x 45s films, social cutdowns
The brief
The client had a name, a rough sketch and a launch date. What they did not have was a character that could survive repetition. Anything we designed had to hold up across dozens of scenes, be animated by more than one pair of hands, and still read at 400 pixels wide in a feed.
The brief was open on style and hard on schedule: three films in eleven weeks.
The approach
We front-loaded the design work. Two weeks on a character bible bought back four weeks of animation later, because nobody had to stop and ask what the hands looked like from three-quarter view.
Build a reusable rig
One rig, swappable mouth and hand libraries. Scene setup dropped from roughly forty minutes to under ten.
Animate in passes
Blocking approved before any inbetweens existed, so revisions landed while they were still cheap.
Selected frames
The result
Three films delivered inside the window, with a fourth produced from leftover assets at no extra design cost. The bible is now the client internal reference for anyone touching the character.
11 weeksConcept to final delivery
4Films from a 3-film budget
75%Less scene setup time
They spent the first fortnight on things we could not see, and then everything after that arrived early.
Producer, Edna Bulgarka
Got something like this in mind?
Tell us what you are trying to make and when it needs to exist. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right studio for it.