Did you ever wonder about the thunder and the lightning? Well, the Nick Jr crew is here to show you what they’re all about. We created this fun mixed media rap video for the updated Noggin app. The video above is very short cutdown from the full music video. The entire piece is ONLY available on the recently redesigned Noggin App. But, shoot us an email and we can show you the whole thing.

This project brought so much joy to our studio. In terms of work we love, it checked all the boxes. It has a fun concept, a super catchy song, and allowed for quite a bit of freedom in developing the story and techniques that ultimately brought it all together. 

The concept and song were inspired by the light show mother nature puts on during every thunderstorm– it’s truly a concert in the clouds.

While this video could have easily been done in one, simple animation style, our pals at Nick Jr. came to us for our skills in mixed media work. We chose papercraft environments, adding in our 2D animation hero characters in post. The main character, the “Thundercloud”, remained the only one built practically and animated in camera–aside from a quick cameo by Mr. Sun of course!  One of the design challenges was figuring out a unique way to visualize the sound of thunder for our young audience. Working with the experts at Nick Jr, we devised a 2D FX animation that resembled the volume buttons on your computer to do just that.