Sesame Street

Moving into Netflix

A fun and exciting experience of two brands coming together and supporting each other! Not just this project, but also myself working alongside two wonderfully talented people: Jingxuan Zhang, who goes by Sophia, and Yilin Li, who goes by Christina.Branding is always an exciting challenge, but this one combined the worlds of Sesame Street and Netflix. The goal was to create the best way for parents to remember where Sesame Street had moved to, and where to go to watch it.

01 Researching the Area

I grew up watching Sesame Street as a really young kid, so I already knew the cast pretty well. But I wanted to learn more about who created it and how it became such a cult classic for children all over America. Back in television’s early years, in 1969, two people, Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, came together to prove that television was here to stay and that it could be used to teach kids.Through the planning of the show and its characters, the main focus was always on children, especially those ten and younger who might not have had access to school. Even today, we can see the lasting impact and wonders of shows like Sesame Street.But that still begs the question: why am I going through all of this history?
"How can we make parents remeber where to find Sesame Street?"

Pitch 1

Concidering for a way of hijaching Netflix's inter face one of the aproches was a pitch called 'NetElmo'. Where the text would come up fuzzy but the squash and streach into 'flix' as Elmo popped out of place. Showing Elmo right next to 'Netflix.

Pitch 2

Our second Idea was a child like hand drawn style that lives on boxes; both Elmo and Cookie Monster cruelly drawn on as if by a child, and both characters help to celebrate the coming togetherness of both brands.

02 Laying the Foundation
Both ideas were pretty cool, so our art director requested that we make both since there were three of us in the group. I mainly helped Sophia with the second pitch, where my task was to build and create the hand-drawn animation required for the scene and its actions.I’ll be the first to admit, there were definitely some bumps in the road when we started working on the second pitch.
BRAIN STORM
BUILDING
The first thing we needed to figure out was what kind of style felt the most kid-like. And really, what’s more kid-like than fan art? I created three different styles of what fan art of the Sesame Street characters could look like.One style leaned more adult, another was “child-inspired” mimicking a child’s illustration but with a bit more refinement and the last one was all about letting go of perfectionism.
That third style was meant to feel like something an eight- or five-year-old might draw, focusing on shapes and size exaggeration rather than asking, “Will people still recognize this character if I add this?”Another challenge was figuring out how these styles would animate.
The three different art fan styles
How could I get Elmo and Cookie Monster to do what they would normally do in a scene and still be in the ball park of 5 seconds?
And this was the shot I was working with. So I have a very limited amount of space to work with but also needed to be on the face of the boxes.
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I was also short on time, so I wasn’t able to make a functioning storyboard. The team and I discussed what should happen, but without a storyboard, a lot of the first pass of animation came down to trial and error.
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The first challenge was deciding how refined Elmo’s walk should be in the scene. We tested two different walks, since Elmo was the one moving around the most. The version we ended up choosing was what one of my teammates called the “crab-like” walk. That led us down the hilariously line-boiled road of Elmo scuttling like a crab.
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Once the walk was settled, the rest of the animation followed: Elmo meets up with Cookie Monster and draws on the “N” for Netflix. This second animation came together pretty quickly, all things considered. The hardest part was the compositing, which was handled entirely by Sophia. She did some incredible work blending Elmo into the boxes and making sure he stayed consistent in scale across both. I’d definitely recommend checking out Sophia's Case Study on that!
This was the first pass for walking style
The 'crab' walk animation pass
Elmo & Cookie Monster
04 Packing it up
After all the challenges and a bit of elbow grease, we finally added the last touches and wrapped up the project for the client to decide which pitch would be chosen. Here’s the final version of the second pitch, time to see it in action!

If you would like to see how the second pitch came out, check out Christina's Case Study here!