Japanese-Style 2D Animation Ad | Food Animation | Fook Yuen Tangyuan - Late Studio | Hong Kong Animation Studio

“Gather with Fook Yuen, savour every bite.”

Late Studio was invited by Fook Yuen Tangyuan, a 30-year-old local tangyuan brand, to create a Japanese-style 2D food animation promoting the brand’s values and its new Golden Custard Tangyuan. For the Japanese-style 2D animation, we also invited Yabee Creative to co-produce.

Our client Nova places great importance on controlling the brand image and designed a series of distinctive brand identity elements for Fook Yuen Tangyuan, including colours and patterns. They also built the brand’s social media channels themselves, showing how much this long-established Hong Kong brand values its identity. Follow Fook Yuen Tangyuan’s official Instagram for the latest news.

Client福元湯圓 FookYuenStoryboardNova SzeProductionLate StudioAnimation Director & CompositingKaicho WongDesign SettingYuki TongSound EffectsLi Ching2D AnimationYabee CreativeAnimation ProducerSimon WonAnimation SupervisorIssacKey AnimationCK, MoonBackground阿宅, Dahata

Final Animation

We created two versions of the film for Fook Yuen Tangyuan, each with a different storyline. (The voice-over was recorded and added by the client.)

Early 2D StoryboardFrom Draft to Final

Before approaching us, the client had already made a draft animatic, so we quickly reached a clear consensus on the direction of the film and early communication went very smoothly. After several in-depth discussions, we decided to make two separate films and went through them shot by shot, adding detail to every frame until we arrived at the final storyboard.

The early 2D animatic provided by our client Nova.

Japanese-Style 2D Animation Ad | Food Animation | Fook Yuen Tangyuan

The client wanted brand elements (the pattern or orange elements) to appear in every shot, which was reflected in our storyboard design.

Japanese-Style 2D Animation Pre-productionAnimation Settings

Besides Late Studio, Yabee Creative also took part in this project. To make sure the visual design stayed in line with the client’s direction, we created prop setting sheets and guidelines for the animation. Animation settings are a necessary step in every animation and play a major role in keeping a team consistent.

Prop setting sheet: matching the brand’s yellow and orange colour scheme, with the brand’s signature pattern running through the whole film.

ProductionThe Japanese 2D Animation Industry Pipeline

This animation was made in a Japanese 2D anime style, and production followed the pipeline of the Japanese animation industry. Yabee is one of the few studios in Hong Kong that works directly with a top-tier Japanese animation pipeline, and they are highly professional.

For this animation, Late Studio handled early communication and planning, part of the backgrounds, in-betweens, clean-up and colouring during production, as well as compositing in post-production. Yabee Creative handled the layouts and key animation, along with part of the backgrounds, in-betweens, clean-up and colouring.

When handing over key animation with Yabee Creative, we used the Japanese animation “time sheet” to record the frame timing of each shot.

Left: key frames of shots 1 to 4; right: frames after adding in-betweens and clean-up.

Left: key frames of shot 5; right: frames after adding in-betweens and clean-up.

The Four Stages of the Japanese Animation Pipeline

Production process of shots 1 and 2: line art, colouring, initial compositing, final compositing.

Production process of shots 3 and 4: line art, colouring, initial compositing, final compositing.

Production process of the ending shot: line art, colouring, initial compositing, final compositing.

Compositing the 2D Animation

Compositing brought together the animation and the backgrounds painted by Yabee Creative, then refined the lighting and colour layers to convey the warm, delicious feel of the tangyuan. We used After Effects, a tool also commonly used for compositing in the Japanese industry.