Charming hand-drawn characters bring TV Licensing help videos to life

This series of eight animated films, written and produced by Red Bee Creative, unpacks TV Licensing’s most popular topics, such as: how you get licenced, protecting yourself from scams and making the switch to going paperless. Animation across all the films was designed and directed by Chris Cray from Somesense.

The explainer films place charming presenter Nelly Telly front and centre of this hand-drawn world, helping to make each topic clear and engaging.

To show all these aspects, Nelly interacts with a whole host of characters, environments and graphic design elements. These elements were all rendered by Cray in a clear illustration style. You can catch Nelly at a music festival, on a boat and fending off a scammer. To add visual interest to the more technical sequences, Nelly is joined by her cat, who amiably reacts to the visuals and, as it turns out, knows its way around an online form.

For the Help Videos to be relatable for a wide audience, Nelly Telly needed to be matter of fact and agreeable. The core of this relatability was to make her animated performance feel real and human, with characterful touches, like her glasses slipping down her nose. The film’s colour palette was rooted in TV Licensing’s brand colours and the team found naturalistic opportunities to incorporate these colours into the animations. This integrated use of design and illustration in the films cohesively extends TV Licensing’s branding into the playful realm of character animation.

Red Bee Creative comments: We cherish our long-standing relationship with TV Licensing and were delighted to help bring these explainer films to life in an engaging way, which combines absolute clarity of messaging with smart touches of entertainment across a wide variety of complex subjects.

Founder and Director at Somesense, Chris Cray, comments: “We found it an incredibly rewarding experience working with Red Bee Creative to build an animated world for TV Licensing. It is also satisfying to note that with the films amounting to 30 minutes of animation, they could just as well be a whole episode on TV.”