Trolli Social
To win Trolli’s social work, we didn’t make a deck. We made the thing! I guided a select group of 3D artists on my team to rebuild a scene from the brand’s stop-motion campaign in 3D, matching its strange physical charm closely enough that the client could see exactly what an ongoing social world might become.
Brief
The worm characters created by Becky and Joe already had a very specific personality: tactile, imperfect, brain-dead, and completely lovable.
The goal was to translate that practical stop-motion quality into a repeatable 3D system without cleaning away everything that made it funny. We were also competing against several animation studios, so a written treatment alone was not going to separate us.
And winning the work was only the beginning. The system needed to support a steady stream of short-form social posts, giving the characters room to enter new situations while still feeling connected to the original campaign.
Approach
The team studied the practical work closely, from the translucency and sugar texture of the candy to the slightly awkward movement of the characters. We built a polished style frame, then took the additional step of producing a full-resolution animated sequence. That gave the client something tangible to react to, not simply a promise of what we might eventually make.
We developed reusable character rigs, materials, lighting setups, environments, and workflows that allowed us to create new posts efficiently without making the work feel formulaic. Each piece could be its own strange little idea, but the characters, movement, and candy-coated tactility always felt unmistakably Trolli.
Role
I proposed using one of the strongest scenes from the broadcast campaign as our proof of concept. Once we won the work, I led the motion team as we turned that initial test into a working production system.
The proof of concept earned our team the Trolli social campaign for the next two years.
From there, the system supported an ongoing stream of weird, character-driven social posts and gave Trolli a flexible 3D world that could continue growing well beyond the scene that started it.
Trolli Social | Making Of / Behind the Scenes
