Design Process

The design process started by annotating each character's mannerisms of each season's title sequence. The first season’s sequence gave me the clearest insight into each character as it did not include portions of their acting scenes. The annotations made it clear to me what makes each character unique and should be showcased in the animation. For example, in the first season’s sequence, Joey is shown laying in the fountain drinking a margarita. From his mannerisms in the sequence, you can infer that he is goofy, laid back, and most likely everyone loves to be around. Based on these drafted characteristics, I was able to find scenes that showcased these qualities. The majority of the scenes I had chosen for each character were some of the most iconic of the series as well as my favorite.

The character illustrations were created on the iPad app ProCreate. At first, the illustrations were hard to recreate as it was hard to get the right color for each object as well as make it dimensional. The most tedious character illustration I completed was Joey, wearing all of Chandler’s clothes. As it is one of my favorite scenes in the series, I could not possibly complete this sequence without it. I spent about 3-4 days collectively illustrating each character's scenes. In addition to the individual cast member illustrations, I illustrated several group pictures as well as the lettering for their names.

Once all of my assets were created, I began assembling my animatics. The animatics allowed me to gain key insights of how to further assemble the sequence such as how long each character is allowed to be on the screen. Based on trial and error and the length of the music to the sequence, I figured out that each character can only be on screen for a maximum of 6 seconds. While 6 seconds does not sound like a lot of time, I quickly realized it was too long for each character illustration to stay on the screen. To add to each character's time slot, I created more illustrations that showed their qualities. From there I decided to overlay a polaroid mask on each illustration to keep the 90s theme represented in the sequence.