Jeffrey Wiener has been a Creative Director working with major brands and small businesses for over 4 decades producing commercial animations and videos. Many of his favorite videos are the product of humor-driven “viral” advertising projects aimed at audiences on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Young Mind Interactive now specializes in creating “Hand Drawn” style animations that are colorful and painterly, produced on the iPad using the APP “Procreate“. Our recent animations are pioneering as they are some of the first commercial projects produced with the new Procreate Dreams in 2024.
GraysonGlobal.world Home page animation – 2025
“Letter to Grandpa”: Animated PSA about the Climate Crisis (produced with Procreate Dreams)
The animation itself is a source of pride for Young Mind Interactive. Creative Director Jeffrey Wiener and his team of young animators used their iPads and the newest animation APP called “Dreams” released by the software company Procreate to produce this in just 45 days. The strategy behind the concept of the animation was to use the expressionistic style of children’s coloring with crayons to communicate the overwhelming emotional impact that Climate Crisis might have on their young minds, making these topics easier to absorb.
Using the technique of a rotoscope style fly-through through a frightening landscape of natural disasters and destruction. The animation is narrated by a young child who is reading a letter to his grandpa about his fears. The animation is linked to a “child-like” website at www.LetterToGrandpa.info with resources for activated users, which allowed the team to track engagement from the social posts, and to converse/debate with readers making comments on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Credits:
Creative Director: Jeffrey Wiener
Production Assistant: Nya Reebe
Procreate/Dreams Animators: Jeffrey Wiener, Nya Reebe, Samiya Ramos, Donavan Dubose
The Lodging Conference has commissioned two “Event-Introduction” videos over the last few years. The purpose was to celebrate the anniversary of the conference’s annual event. This most recent version combined the original introduction animation (the Logo being hand-drawn in pastel) to an extended concept of hand-drawing the anniversary cake, adding decorations, and then exploding the cake into a confetti-dropping finalé.
As I prefer, I used my iPad and the APPs “Procreate” and “Procreate Dreams” to produce various parts of this animation. The outline-drawing parts were done with an “Erase and play-in-Reverse” technique, and the fill was done in a “Record-Your-Stroke” fashion. The challenge was to blend a hand-drawn, 12-frame/per second cake explosion and brand-colored confetti that was integrated into the final piece using Adobe Premiere. So we are using at least 4 software apps to produce a 1.5 minute short:
1. iPad and Procreate to draw everything
2. Adobe Photoshop on the iMac to do video layouts
3. iPad and Procreate Dreams for Frame-by-Frame Confetti
4. Adobe Premiere for assembling all the elements with the music
This animated short was produced for a Non-profit called “Friends of the Virgin Islands” for a Fundraiser for the Island to help the Virgin Islands National Park recover from a tremendously damaging hurricane called Irma (2017). The video narrative is designed to show the threat of these great storms to the fragile wildlife ecosystems, and the animals that live there. I wanted to highlight the resilience of the the plants and animals at the end, to leave it on a positive note. This was produced mostly on the iPad using the APP “Procreate”, which allows you to record the brush strokes. The animated clips were exported to Adobe Premiere where they were layered and put into motion. (This was produced years before Procreate Dreams was introduced.)