When we started development, what we knew we wanted to emphasize were portals and some idea of being transported to another world. I went into the Doodles asset package and got to work putting together scenes and backgrounds, even sometimes constructing assets by sight from videos we’d seen of Doodles animations, and started to put together a few concepts I thought were the strongest to present with the understanding that our assets needed flexibility and room to have a big logo lockup over them while also being a hero image for the show it was representing. The concepts I decided to explore were: A Portal Between Worlds, Fantastical Skies and Places, and Going On An Adventure.

As I moved through it, I wanted to explore the two main characters, Hap and Mello the cat, getting pulled into a portal since that was the inciting event for the experiential show. I modeled it off of the sketches and some of the assets from an animation our team had started developing for the experience. I also wanted to try mixing the pitch themes I’d started: putting the portal with adventure, for example. Adventure’s cornerstone was the main character looking forward, creating a feel of anticipation.

Next, I fine tuned some of the concepts so we could present them to Doodles to review as well. I really ended up utilizing all of the initial pitches since they seemed to represent the narrative of the show well; the fantastical skies felt vast and inviting, the portals told an immediate story, and both supported adventure. In this round, I emphasized more of the idea of the world the portal was opening up to so we could immediately see the arc from start to finish of the experience: seeing portal, going through portal, getting to rainbow world and CAMP.

Final Digital Approach

After talking with Doodles, we finally landed on leaning into developing two main approaches jumping off from the concepts I’d created:
First was the portal concept, which had a really funny, high-movement, adventurous feel to it. It gave you the feeling of being physically transported somewhere magical.

The second hero was the rainbow world that we get transported to, for which I created a CAMP store in DOODLE’s styling and put together a scene where it was nestled in the center. Our two main focal points for this was Hap and Melo commanding the foreground while looking towards our destination, CAMP.

The nice part of this is that it really tightened the visual narrative which I’d started to do before. It felt like two integrated parts to a story: the beginning where we get sucked into the portal and the second part where we arrive in the rainbow world, anticipating getting into CAMP and having a good time.

This is a sample of some of many assets required to support a show installation of this size.

The Print Assets

that I made leaned into the transporting from the lab through the portal and into the rainbow world. For some of our assets, we had both of the story beats represented: the beginning where we get sucked into the rainbow world and the second part, where we find CAMP nestled in the hills, waiting for us to come play and explore.