At Wienot Films, we’re a team of fun-loving creatives who thrive on bringing stories to life through animation. We love a good challenge, and when Halloween rolled around, we thought, why not combine our love for animation with some spooky fun? So, we came up with a unique 3D concept to share the Halloween spirit in our own animated style.
This Halloween, we took on the challenge of creating a social video that tied together the holiday with animation, and a bit of spooky magic. The result? A project that pushed the boundaries of creativity and turned a classic animation technique into something fresh and fun.
The journey started with an old-school animation inspiration: the zoetrope. If you’re unfamiliar, a zoetrope is one of the earliest forms of animation, using a series of images inside a rotating cylinder. As the cylinder spins, the images blur together, creating the illusion of movement. Pretty cool, right? This got us thinking—how could we blend this concept with iconic Halloween imagery?
Enter the pumpkin. Instead of the traditional carved face, we decided to carve out an animation, much like a zoetrope. The result? A spinning pumpkin with an animated sequence carved into it. The idea was simple but visually striking, and so the Halloween video concept was born.
The animation itself had to be short and looping, so we chose a classic Halloween visual: a witch flying on her broomstick. Using Adobe After Effects, the witch was brought to life in a 2-second loop, soaring through the air.
Now, for the tricky part—how do we get that animation onto a 3D pumpkin? That’s where Cinema 4D came in. The pumpkin was modeled in 3D, and the next step was transferring the animation frames onto it. This involved exporting the individual frames of the witch animation, cleaning them up in Adobe Illustrator, and then using Cinema 4D’s cloning tool to arrange the frames in a loop around the pumpkin.
But it didn’t stop there. Using Cinema 4D’s Volume Mesher and Builder tools, the witch shapes were subtracted from the pumpkin model, leaving behind perfectly carved cutouts that revealed the animation sequence as the pumpkin spun. After some trial and error (and a bit of math), we landed on 12 frames per second for the perfect smoothness. While 24 frames per second might seem like the obvious choice, it caused a strobing effect, so we dialed it back for a cleaner result.
24 frames per second:
12 frames per second:
Once the pumpkin was spinning with its animated witch loop, we added the Wienot Films logo to give it a branded touch. With some final touches—spooky lighting, 80s horror-inspired color grading, and some animated text in After Effects—we had ourselves a Halloween animation that’s both fun and a little eerie.
Take a look at the final video, and don’t forget the sound effects and music that really bring the Halloween vibe to life!
At Wienot Films, we love taking creative risks and experimenting with new ideas. If you’re curious about how we approach our animations or want to learn more about the process, get in touch, we’d love to chat!
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