Two part series created for TED-Ed telling the Chinese tale of the white snake in a traditional shadow puppet style.

“I worked with the Kino Bino team on three pieces of TED-Ed video and the collaboration was seamless. The efficiency in communication and turnaround time is quite impressive. Their amazing talent delivers an authentic and creative rendition of the story with cultural context.”

— Shunan Teng - Educator

CLIENT

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. They aim to spark and celebrate the ideas of students and teachers worldwide with their original short animated videos and lessons.

BRIEF

TED-Ed offered us the opportunity to retell this ancient and much loved Chinese story about magic, demons and a love that triumphs over death.

RESULTS

We wanted to evoke traditional Chinese art forms with this film and, after experimenting with different techniques, decided with the team at TED-Ed that shadow puppets would be the perfect way to animate the story. We created an art style that gave a nod to traditional Chinese shadow puppets, but with a modern twist that would appeal to viewers of this predominantly social media based film.

CREDITS

Script: TED-Ed
Educator: Shunan Teng
Music: Gav Cantrell

“When illustrating The Myth of The White Snake, Steff drew inspiration from Chinese shadow play. What a nice job she and her team did! The two-part videos stirred up much enthusiasm from the viewers, complimenting on both the story telling and the artworks.”

— Shunan Teng - Educator

THE PROCESS

The characters for this film went through various design stages. We wanted to capture elements from traditional Chinese shadow theatre as well as give the puppets some character. We experimented with various lighting and texture effects before we reached the final look, mimicking the leather used for traditional screens and puppets.