Animated Bird of the Year
Animated artwork of Aotearoa’s iconic birds.
Year
2026
Summary
Animated Bird of the Year is an ongoing series that visualizes each winner of New Zealand’s Bird of the Year competition as a piece of animated artwork.
This project is a love letter to Aotearoa’s vibrant, personality filled manu and the environments they inhabit while refining my motion design practice across the full pipeline, from concept through to final edit.
Development
Visual Development Stages
With each bird, I began conceptualization by asking myself "what about this bird makes it so special, and how can I capture it?"
For the Tui, I decided on their unmistakable calls and their love of flowering harakeke. For the Piwakawaka, I wanted to capture that magical moment when you suddenly feel like a Disney princess as they flit around your legs, even if they're really just taking advantage of the insects you've stirred up. For the Riroriro, I wanted to highlight their beautifully crafted nests which sometimes attract unwanted squatters.
The visual language surrounding the birds draws inspiration from heritage postage stamps featuring illustrated native species.
I incorporated a kōwhaiwhai with a simple ngutukākā motif into the frame, a pattern with associations with its namesake plant, the kākā bird the plant is named after and our relationships with te taiao as a whole.
I saw this project as an opportunity to further develop my workflow for combining raster illustration with
vector-based animation.
I illustrated backgrounds and other elements that could be animated with simple keyframes in raster, while focal elements with more complex movement, such as the featured birds, were created as flat vectors and refined in After Effects to match the raster illustrations.
