Work Choose your own graduation

Four numbered black-and-white line-art concept sketches exploring different casual wardrobe and styling options for the character Friend.
Exploring looks, poses, and expressions for Sam and their friend, the two Yukon youth who guide students through the Grad Planner story.
Five numbered black-and-white line-art concept sketches exploring various hairstyles, winter jackets, and accessory combinations for the character Sam.
Full-color character turnaround and reference sheet for the character Sam. The image shows her from four angles, wearing traditional mukluks, alongside a detailed lip-sync and facial expression chart.
Bringing characters to life. Turnarounds and expression sheets for Sam and Friend. The styling carries culturally grounded details like winter mukluks and moccasins, so students recognize the people on screen.
Four numbered black-and-white line-art concept sketches exploring different casual wardrobe and styling options for the character Friend.
The animated character Sam overlaid with a dense, yellow triangular wireframe mesh on a transparent background, illustrating the structural rigging used for facial expressions and body movement.
Character rigging. The wireframe mesh on Sam, built in Adobe Character Animator, is what lets her move and change expression naturally.
Split-screen composite image of a 3D forest environment. The left side shows the untextured grayscale wireframe geometry, while the right side reveals the final full-color render with sunset lighting and two 2D animated characters standing on a path.
A composite view of the 3D forest environment created in Blender. By contrasting the untextured grayscale mesh with the fully colored render, this image highlights the careful lighting and environmental texturing required to seamlessly integrate the 2D characters into a 3D space.

A paper planner nobody opened, rebuilt as a story

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Challenge

The Yukon First Nation Education Directorate (YFNED) wanted to reimagine how students engage with graduation planning. Their existing Grad Planner lived as a printed booklet and PDF, which was thorough but suffered from low student uptake because the format didn't match how youth actually like to engage with content. The new experience needed to feel genuinely engaging and relevant to Yukon students, respect the diversity of First Nations cultures across the territory, and deliver on a large, ambitious vision within a modest budget.

Solution

I built YFNED an interactive web app that feels exploratory rather than instructional: a choose-your-own-adventure video following two Yukon youth through secondary school, with JavaScript controlling the playhead so a student's decisions shape the story as it unfolds. Character animation sits inside a custom 3D environment built in Blender, pop-ups surface guidance at the moments a student would actually want it, and the full Grad Planner is digitized alongside the narrative for anyone who wants the reference rather than the ride. First Nations artists did the illustration and the voiceover, so the story sounds like the territory it's set in.

Results

The planner stopped being a document students had to be told to open. It's something they move through at their own pace now, and the guidance arrives inside the story instead of ahead of it. The ambition also survived the budget, which for a project carrying character animation, a custom 3D build, First Nations voiceover and a full content digitization is worth saying out loud.

Credits

Creative direction, experience design, animation and development
Mikayla Ericsson
Account management
Bianca Jorgenson
Illustration
Lara Bode
Voiceover
Melanie Bennett and two Yukon youth
Studio
MBDC