3D animation is one industry that is gaining prominence in Kenya and we started seeing them being used in some ads by Safaricom like the Sambaza Internet or the one done by JTL to market their Faiba product. These were done by the now well known Fatboy Animations and we could relate to them thanks to their mannerisms and the portrayal of the idiosyncratic nature of Kenyans.
Since this is a relatively new industry, there are few players and one of them is Epic Studios. They uploaded an animation project on their website and Facebook page by the name “It’s not my name.”
In the video, there is a female character named Carolynne Nginda Mutuku (who in my opinion is probably a parody of the well known Caroline Mutoko) who has been modelled to display sassy facial expressions and hand movement. In the two minute video, Carolynne, a media personality/journalist/radio presenter/celeb touches on people “misspelling” her name and how important is it to be distinct.
Epic studios also described the project in this manner:
So I wanted to create something fun, with a little more facial animation and exaggeration for effect. Plus to laugh a bit, so I created this character, Carolynne. Enjoy the animation.
That is not the only animation project they have posted on their website. There is one which is a video of an animation character named Greg who dances to several songs in a different way and it is quite impressive.
It is cool we have people who can be able to come up with cool animation videos and probably in the future, we could see a film made by these upcoming animation studios.
