Embodied Inc.

Moxie
Animation Director / Art Director

Moxie is a robot designed to help children learn about emotions and empathy. I started with the company as a freelance artist helping to create the look for Moxie. I worked on designs for the body and face for several months and then joined the team as a full time animator. I created the model for the face and worked with another artist on the final rigging. Moxie needed to be extremely emotive so getting the face to work well was key to making the character into something that children would connect with.

I worked with the programming team to create a unique animation system using Maya and Unity from scratch. Because Moxie had to react in real time to any input from children the animations had to be created in such a way that they could quickly blend from one to another to give Moxie a life-like appearance. Over the course of 6 1/2 years I created over 2,000 unique animations for this system that allowed Moxie to talk, dance and play with thousands of children.

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I created a full stable of characters that worked at the fictional Global Robotics Laboratory. These character were designed help Moxie tell stories that explained different learning scenarios. These characters were used in hundreds of storybook style images that appeared on the robots face as the stories were told and also in 2 comic books that shipped with the robot.

I created over 200 unique icons that were used to help children interact with Moxie. The icons were designed with a style that was child friendly but still allowed them to easily direct Moxie to the games, conversations and activities with which they wanted to engage.

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I created hundreds of images for marketing along with 12 months of unique mailers, full of art, that were sent to the children over the course of a year which allowed them to engage with Moxie in unique ways.

Another project associated with Moxie was a website where they could play games with the robot. I created art for those games along with helping to design some of the games.

For most of my tenure, I was the entire art department. However, there was a period of time where I worked as art director for 2 other artists who were also creating images for the project.