Bringing My Voice Library’s original characters and environments to life with AI, reimagining familiar illustrations in 3D with added depth, personality and playfulness.
Charity
Figma Weave
3D Render
Background
A few years ago, I developed the creative concept and illustrations for My Voice Library, a gamified app that helps children with dysarthria contribute voice and facial movement data to research on future assistive communication technologies.
Friendly characters and themed environments helped turn a demanding data-collection process into an accessible, playful experience. I created these as flat illustrations, but I always wanted to explore how they could feel more expressive and alive.
The Idea
Inspired by the personality of Duolingo’s characters, I wanted to give my illustrations more depth, presence and movement. Using Figma Weave, I explored how the characters and their environments could be reimagined in a 3D style, then brought to life through short animations.
It was an opportunity to revisit an earlier creative ambition while learning what I could achieve with AI.
Inside Weave
Familiar characters. A new dimension.
The Animation Challenge
The biggest challenge was making the animation feel natural in a six-second scene.
I wanted the characters to blink, subtly shift, and move the objects they were holding, while background elements also came to life. With so much happening in a short sequence, timing became essential.
The aim was to draw attention to the character’s face first, then let movement elsewhere reveal the scene. Getting that flow right took several attempts.
What Worked
The breakthrough came from writing the animation prompt as a timeline. I placed a blink near the beginning and another towards the end, with subtle character and prop movements between them. I staggered background actions so the whole scene wasn’t competing for attention at once.
For the visuals, using the complete original illustration as the reference for a 3D-style render also worked better. That image became the starting point for the animation.
What Didn’t
My first approach was to generate the character and background individually in a 3D style, then ask AI to combine the two images. That combination didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. I went back to the complete original scene and restyled it as one image before animating.
Likewise, requesting several movements without a clear sequence made it harder to achieve the gentle, natural flow I wanted.
Key Learnings
This experiment taught me to pay as much attention to when something moves as to what moves. A timeline gave the prompt a clearer structure, while subtle, staggered actions helped guide attention through the scene.
It also showed me the value of starting with the full composition. In this exploration, a simpler visual starting point proved more useful than assembling separate elements.
Weave Workflow:
🔗Link to Workflow🔗
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Where It Could Go Next
The characters could grow into a recognisable cast, each with a name, personality and playful connection to their world. Short animations could feature across social media, website callouts and promotional content, giving people a glimpse of the experience inside My Voice Library.
Each character could introduce a “Did you know?” moment, sharing a short fact or sentence linked to their theme from life on the farm to a busy building site. This would echo the interactions already found in the platform, connecting the marketing to the experience children encounter in the app.
The opportunity is to extend the original illustrations into a flexible collection of animated stories building familiarity with the characters, bringing their worlds to life and helping more people discover My Voice Library and its purpose.
