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Character Animation for Consumer Products: S-Market Uutuudet
S-Market wanted its new product lineup, ice creams, candies, drinks, and cookies, to feel unforgettable from the very first launch. For their Elämä on ruokaa (Life is Food) campaign, we turned that lineup into fully realized animated characters. Each one got its own personality, its own comic timing, and its own place in a shared creative universe. This is what character animation for consumer products looks like when a brand needs four distinct worlds delivered inside a single campaign.
Consumer product marketing lives or dies on the shelf, and increasingly, it lives or dies on the scroll too. Standing out among dozens of near-identical products takes more than clever copy. It takes characters that people remember and want to see again. For S-Market, that meant giving their new products a face, a voice, and a reason to be talked about.
Client
SOK / S-Market
Agency
Make It Simple
Building Character Animation for Consumer Products at Scale
S-Market needed four original character worlds delivered inside a single campaign, without sacrificing craft along the way. We worked closely with SOK and Make It Simple to build a production system that kept pace with that ambition. Together, we delivered a full slate of character animation for consumer products, including:
- Four 20-second hero commercials, one per product world
- Twelve social cutdowns, three per world, versioned for 9:16 and 4:5
- Out-of-home (OOH) executions for all four worlds
- Digital out-of-home (DOOH) versions in both 9:16 and 16:9
- Dedicated high-resolution character stills for each product world
As a result, S-Market’s four very different product worlds still read as one single, unmistakable campaign.
Design & Development: From Concept to Character
Four character worlds, developed side by side, still needed one consistent design language. That’s how S-Market’s brand stayed recognizable across every product world. The design process moved from early concept sketches through fully rigged, expressive characters. Candies, cookies, drinks, and ice creams all followed the same pipeline. Each one was built to hold its own comic timing on screen.
Take a look behind the scenes below. This gallery gathers character design sheets, concept art, storyboards, animatic snippets, and render tests from across all four productions.
Take a look behind the scenes below. This gallery gathers character design sheets, concept art, storyboards, animatic snippets, render tests, and styleframes drawn from across all four productions.
Animatics for Character Animation
Animatics: Locking Rhythm and Tempo Before Animation Begins
Every S-Market character started as an animatic long before final animation began. Building an animated 2D storyboard with rough voiceover let us test each film’s rhythm and comic timing while changes still cost almost nothing. S-Market could then hear exactly how a joke or a scene transition would land, well before a single frame of final animation existed. Our own production experience holds true here too: an animatic that already feels perfectly paced usually plays too fast once full animation and sound design land on top. Every animatic therefore went through several rounds of client feedback until pacing and story structure lined up. That upfront alignment protected the production timeline, since fixing direction later costs far more than fixing it here. Read more about how we use animatics in animation production.
Character Animation for Consumer Products
Clay Renders: Proving Movement Before Final Rendering
Once animation itself took shape, every scene moved into a previsualization pass, often called a clay render. This greyscale, real time viewport render shows exactly how characters, cameras, and props move, stripped of color, texture, and lighting. Because nothing distracts from movement at this stage, S-Market’s team could judge each shot on its own merits. Comic timing, camera swing, and a prop’s believable path all came under scrutiny before anything moved forward. Afterward, once movement earned sign-off, the production advanced into full rendering with confidence instead of guesswork. Costly lighting and texture work only touched shots that had already proven themselves in motion. This same discipline, prove movement before you render it, sits behind every character animation for consumer products campaign we build, S-Market’s four worlds included.
Look Development for Character Animation
Look Development: Confirming Light, Material, and Mood Before Full Rendering
Before a single full sequence went into final rendering, every S-Market world passed through look development first. Rendering initial still frames let us test lighting, material, color, and overall mood on the actual 3D characters and sets. That beat guessing how a scene might read once motion, sound, and editing came together. Because these stills isolate one variable at a time, feedback stayed specific, right down to whether the ice cream world felt sunny enough. Once the client approved a world’s look, that same lighting setup and color mood carried through every frame of the full sequence. Nothing needed reinventing mid-production. Look development protected both budget and consistency at once. Fixes that took days to catch on thousands of rendered frames took minutes to catch on a single still. Getting light and mood right before rendering is what separates a forgettable spot from character animation people actually remember.
S-Market Ice Creams
Playful Character Animation for Consumer Products: Meet S-Market’s New Ice Creams
At the head of the table sits a self-assured ice cream cone. Behind it, the camera pulls back to reveal a whole lineup of equally characterful cones, popsicles, and chocolate-dipped sticks. “We’re not old familiar faces,” the cone announces. “We’re the new ice creams.” One by one, the rest of the lineup echoes its own variation on the same joke. Finally, Taneli Mäkelä’s voice-over lands S-Market’s signature line: whatever the occasion, S-Market delivers the new ice creams. This is character animation for consumer products at its most bite-sized: one confident character, one running joke, one campaign line. For the complete behind-the-scenes story, read the full S-Market Ice Creams case study.
S-Market Candies
Colorful Character Animation for Consumer Products: Meet S-Market’s New Candies
A plump candy takes the head of the table this time, surrounded by an equally lively cast of fruit sweets, marshmallows, salty licorice squares, and licorice ribbons. The same beat plays out: “we’re not old familiar faces, we’re the new candies.” Once again, the rest of the table echoes back its own take, and Mäkelä’s voice-over ties the joke back to S-Market. Repeating the same structure for a second character world shows exactly how character animation for consumer products can scale without feeling repetitive.
S-Market Drinks
Refreshing Character Animation for Consumer Products: Meet S-Market’s New Drinks
Next, a confident can leads the drinks table, its straw bent like a quiff. It offers the same introduction as the others: “we’re not old familiar faces, we’re the new drinks.” Soon, the rest of the lineup joins in, and the campaign’s voice-over and closing line bring the third chapter home. Here too, character animation for consumer products turns a simple product shot into a character with real presence.
S-Market Cookies
Warm, Character-Led Animation for Consumer Products: Meet S-Market’s New Cookies
Finally, a chocolate chip cookie opens this fourth chapter and greets the table as “crumbs.” It then introduces itself and its fellow biscuits as the new cookies on the shelf, closing out the campaign’s fourth and final character world. Across all four chapters, this consistent structure is what makes character animation for consumer products feel like one campaign instead of four separate ideas.
DOOH and Social
Native Versions Across Social and DOOH
A campaign this size only works if every version feels native to where it plays. Beyond the four hero commercials, S-Market’s characters also reached audiences through a wide range of social cutdowns. Each one earned its own aspect ratio treatment rather than a simple crop from the original film. Subtitled versions covered sound-off social viewing, while separate no-sound edits ran across various digital out of home (DOOH) ad surfaces, where passing audiences never hear a soundtrack at all. Consequently, one story became dozens of tailored films, each built for how and where its audience would actually watch. That attention to native fit, not just native size, is what let character animation for consumer products travel this far across so many platforms without losing its voice.
OOH and Print
OOH and Print: Retouched Stills for Image Placements
Not every touchpoint moves. That’s why S-Market also needed a full set of still images built for out of home (OOH), posters, and print placements, media with no motion, sound, or music to carry it. Because of that, our team pulled and retouched final high-resolution frames, everything from full character group shots to single-character portraits. Group compositions gave S-Market’s four worlds a shared moment together. Individual portraits let one character carry a poster, a shelf card, or a print ad entirely on its own. Every frame then went through the same finishing pass, color correction, cleanup, and sharpening. That work let a still hold up just as well printed three meters wide as it did on a phone screen. This range, from full casts down to single characters, gave S-Market’s media buyers flexibility across every placement this character animation for consumer products campaign called for.
Radio
Radio Spots: Familiar Voice, Brand New Characters
Radio posed a real challenge for a campaign built on brand new characters. Listeners couldn’t yet recognize a character’s voice or face the way they could on screen. So every spot leaned on a familiar face instead. Well known Finnish actor Taneli Mäkelä greets each new product as though he already knows them. Each time, he gets politely corrected once the characters reveal who they really are. The same structure repeated across ice creams, candies, drinks, and cookies, in both 15 and 30 second cuts. That consistency mattered: even a listener who had never seen a single frame of animation still walked away knowing exactly which products were new and where to find them.
Production Process: Character Animation for Consumer Products
S-Market could count on one clear, structured process across every one of the four worlds. That process ran from idea and script, through storyboard and animatic creation, character design and rigging, and animation production, to post-production work such as sound design, compositing, and color grading. From there, the production team versioned every asset for its platform and channel. That consistency is what let four character worlds deliver on-brand character animation for consumer products without losing craft along the way.
One Campaign, Four Worlds, One Year
Four character worlds. One campaign year. One consistent creative system.
For S-Market, bringing animated characters to life directly from real products proved a reliable way to make advertising memorable. Doing it four times over, inside a single campaign, meant building a pipeline that could scale without losing personality. That’s what character animation for consumer products looks like when a brief calls for range as much as craft.
Looking for Character Animation for Consumer Products?
If you’re bringing new products to market, your marketing should feel just as memorable as the products themselves. Whether it’s one character or an entire shelf of them, we’re ready to build it with you. After all, character animation for consumer products works best when it’s built as a system, not a one-off. Oh, and take a look at some of our previous character animation work too. A few favorites: Giga Bear, Serla Brand animations, and Merge Mansion: Hopeberry Juice Spike!
