Character Builder Campaign

Overview

Powtoon's Character Builder is a DIY design tool that lets anyone assemble a custom character, face, hair, outfit, colourway, and save it straight to their personal library, ready to drop into any Powtoon they make. The launch campaign had to make that process feel as immediate as it does in the product.

The challenge

The appeal of the Character Builder is the sheer number of combinations it can produce. That is exactly what makes it hard to advertise: a launch film cannot show a thousand variants without becoming a catalogue, and a catalogue does not make anyone want to build anything. We needed the campaign to communicate range while following a single character closely enough that viewers stayed with it.

The approach

We built one hero character family in 3D and rigged it properly rather than faking the poses. A full face rig gave us blend-shape control over expression, and a separately rigged hand let us shoot real interaction with the interface, the character reaching into her own customisation panel and changing herself. Blocking was approved as animation before any surfacing work started, so the timing carried the film and the render was the last variable rather than the first.

The result

The campaign shipped as a hero film plus a set of cut-downs for social and in-product placement. The rigs outlived the campaign: because they were built as reusable assets rather than one-off shots, the same character family went on to appear across later Powtoon marketing.