‘Life of Ong Lai’ sticker pack is finally ready, and this time, the stickers are animated!
background
It has been a while since I last launched stickers with Ong Lai Art, and I’ve been wanting to create stickers that could be used on a more regular basis as those that I’ve made in the past were usually for festive seasons.
I’m not sure if you recall, but in 2021, I posted some sketches on Instagram and Facebook and got you all to vote on which sketches I should use to make stickers. One suggestion was to make them animated, but at that time, it seemed like a lot of work, and then things got busy, and the whole pack got shelved. Till now.
ideas and concepts behind the stickers
I first created some funny (okay maybe it’s dark humour kind of funny) stickers to depict the tough times in life, like a pineapple soul leaving its pineapple body, or having low battery, or little pixels leaving a pineapple body. However I also wanted positive and neutral stickers. Hence the positive ones came from the idea of encouraging the sad/tired pineapples. From there we got stickers like the ‘Let’s Do This!’ from a pineapple on fire, ‘Jiayou’ literally with a a jug of oil dripping on a pineapple, ‘What’s Up?” from a friendly pineapple just checking in.
To also make some stickers more, how would you say, open to interpretation, I removed the text from some stickers. So this pineapple with pixels flying out could either be a pineapple shutting down, or just on screensaver mode. And this one staring into the sky could be pensive or just thinking what’s going to be for lunch.
illustration and animation process
Earlier for static stickers, things were easier because I just illustrated, coloured and uploaded the picture files as stickers on the sticker apps. For animated stickers, it’s a whole other way of doing this. I didn’t want to illustrate a whole bunch of frames (the norm is 24 frames per second?!!) and anyway proper animation isn’t my forte. So… in came my sister (another Ong!) and she used Adobe After Effects to animate the stickers! I would have to illustrate the stickers in layers. Each element to be animated is a layer. After all of these came our first round of reviewing. Are some stickers too fast? Are some motions not obvious enough?
The next step was unexpectedly the most painful step for us. Our stickers were done and ready, but then we realised they were too large in size for most sticker apps. Some apps helped to compress the files but the animation became choppy. We had to identify how to scale down the stickers while not compromising on the illustration quality and keeping the motion elements as much as we could.
I can’t remember how many apps we tried, how many rounds we did – but WE DID IT.
In case any of you would like the information so you can make your own stickers…I’ll be making a post with this soon and update you all.
support us
We’re so glad to finally roll the stickers out to you guys, and here’s how you can use them and spice up your Whatsapp texts!
- Download the Sticker.ly (recommended because our stickers look the best on this app!) or WhatSticker app.
- Use the following links
Feel free to share the links to your friends if they would like to get the stickers too! I mean they could just save the stickers you use in the chat, but with Sticker.ly the pack gets updated if we add new stickers to it!
If this inspires you and you would like us to create stickers for you, drop me an email to find out more!
