All of us at least once have tried to create our personalised ‘emoji’ for social media experience to express your thoughts and feelings.
Known as Bitmoji, these personalised representations have been turned into comic strips, stickers, mobile games, and now an animated series. Emojis are so famous that Sony even made a movie titled The Emoji Movie.
The new animated experiment is going to make cartoons very personal, as Bitmoji TV arrives on Snapchat’s Discover on Saturday, 1 February. Building on Bitmoji Stories’ popular customisable character comics, the comedy series will send viewer’s Bitmojis on new adventures inspired by television genres, from talent shows to cop dramas.
All this frenzy around Bitmoji began in 2007 when Jacob ‘Ba’ Blackstock together with David Kennedy, Shahan Panth, Dorian Baldwin, and Jesse Brown founded Bitstrips, a media and technology company allowing its users to create personalized comic strips.
Their endeavour was so successful that Snapchat acquired the company in July 2016. Since then, Bitmoji have gone on to become a staple among internet users. Since the personalised comic strips were launched in 2018, more than 130 million Snapchat users have watched Bitmoji Stories.
The first season of Bitmoji TV consists of 10 four-minute episodes, airing weekly on Saturday mornings on Discover. Some episodes will feature the viewer’s own ‘avatar’ with the help of dynamic animation updates to keep up with their latest cartoon look and those of their friends. Other episodes will feature celebrity guests like Randy Jackson, Andy Richter, Jon Lovitz and Riki Lindhome. While other characters in the animation series can talk, viewers’ own characters won’t have a voice as of now.
Bitmoji TV is created entirely in-house by the Toronto-based Bitmoji team, with dedicated artists, animators, storyboarders, engineers and so on.
The crew has built a new, proprietary production framework developed specifically for Bitmoji TV, and invested in a system that dynamically renders and streams every episode on-demand, so that each viewer has a unique experience featuring their own troupe of avatars.
This unique technology considers a variety of factors for these viewing experiences, including the size and shape of each viewer’s particular Bitmoji and how they fit into each scene including their friends’.
