Book trailers are a murky marketing asset. It’s difficult to track their influence on sales, so they should serve as an entertaining extension of the property itself. Children’s Books are uniquely suited for animated trailers. The audience is amenable to the fun and fanciful treatment, and the written content doesn’t typically suffer from the pre-imagining of characters and plots. However, like children’s books, animated trailers can appear deceptively easy to produce… but can be very tricky to perfect.
Author Tanya Valentine created the story and characters for Little Taco Truck, and partnered with veteran illustrator Jorge Martin to visualize her world. Martin’s designs lend themselves perfectly to animation – so we adapted the character assets directly from his art files and animated them in Toon Boom Harmony.
The art for Valentine’s first book, All Bears Need Love, was not exactly designed for the animated story that needed to be told. So we adapted the characters for vector based animation (while maintaining their warm, textured appeal), and created this heartwarming spot.
For young animators and fans of Toon Boom Harmony (and animation in general), director Tony Grillo produced a series of tutorials on working with Little Taco Truck’s bitmap assets, detailing the pipeline from photoshop preparation thru to incidental animation.
This series was picked up and promoted by ToonBoom themselves, now the industry standard for animation tools in the US and UK (and growing through Asia and Europe).
They have since have reached thousands of viewers.
The inspiration for Valentine’s first book, All Bears Need Love, was her adopted son Benjamin… who would later lend his voice as the narrator in the trailer for her second book, Little Taco Truck.