Expressive Character Animation for Finch App

Character animation created as part of an animation trial for Finch, the Self-Care Pet app.

The brief was to create short animations using Finch’s existing character design, with a focus on expressiveness, body movement, squash and stretch, anticipation, and secondary motion.

My aim was to push the character visually while keeping it consistent with Finch’s existing language, and to approach the work with real production and product constraints in mind.

The examples I was given by Finch seemed to mostly be animated in a paper-doll style, flat rigging. By that I mean, the head and body rarely rotates in 3D space.

I rigged the character with Joysticks so the head and body could rotate and deform, creating a subtle 2.5D effect without changing the established character design.

The result feels more dimensional, expressive, and premium, while the reusable rig makes future animations faster and more consistent.

I created the animations in After Effects and made them Lottie-compatible, even though this wasn’t required by the trial. Since Finch is a mobile app, I wanted the work to reflect a realistic path into the product, not just produce a pretty but heavy video or GIF.

The same principle informs how I work in Rive today: build the character and animation system once, then use it as a foundation for a wider library of content.

The first animation followed their provided storyboard. I added head movement while Finch blows the trumpets, giving the performance more energy, so it’s not just going from Pose A to B.

I made sure the rig I created felt consistent with their character design, and so I made sure to find some of their existing illustrations and put them side-by-side. If they used a party hat before, for example, I would use the same party hat design again, for consistency's sake.

For the second animation, I had more creative freedom, so I created a heart beam attack.

I focused on the anticipation before the beam, gradually building energy before the payoff. Because I made the rig once already, this one was significantly faster to produce.

The final brief introduced Sunny, a flower Finch interacts with.

One of the biggest challenges was actually the watering can pose. Finch is incredibly short and stubby, and Sunny even moreso. My solution was to have Finch lift the can way up above its head.

Although the brief called for a walk cycle, I kept Finch’s legs out of frame. Not only did it make the animation easier to produce, showing the full walk would have required zooming out, making both characters smaller and weakening the composition.

This project was about more than making good-looking animation. I built a reusable rig that improves the quality of the movement while saving production time, made the animations compatible with a mobile product, and made creative decisions around real compositional constraints.

I hope the side-by-side comparison between the samples Finch provided and my proposed improvements to it can speak for itself.