"Create the Escape" – Puzzle Design & Animation
Role: Illustrator & Motion Graphics Animator
Project: Create the Escape (Series Graphics Package)
Production Company/Network: Departure Films/Peacock
Year: 2021
High-Low Glyphics
Get In Line
Shadows of the Past
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In the summer of 2021, I reunited with the production team at Departure Films to design and animate visual assets for a pair of dynamic series Create the Escape and Back Yard Blow Out. For Create the Escape, the narrative premise centered on elaborate escape rooms conceptualized by children. My core objective within the show's graphics package was to visually map out these complex, kid-designed traps and demonstrate to the viewing audience exactly how the adult contestants would have to solve them to get out.
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Translating the wild, imaginative logic of kid-driven puzzles into clear, legally coherent game mechanics for a television format required a heavy focus on information design. The graphics package needed to look technically precise—evoking the structural feel of an architectural or engineering schematic blueprint—while remaining vibrant, fun, and fast-paced enough to match the high-energy tone of a modern streaming series.
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While the lead animator established the master book framework and the page-flipping transitional sequences, I was given complete creative ownership over the interior execution—hand-illustrating and animating the distinct mechanics for the escape rooms.
While I developed an extensive volume of puzzles throughout the series' run, the three examples showcased below highlight a unified suite of assets from a single Egyptian-themed episode: Queen Hasina's Tomb:
Tomb Blueprint Mapping & Puzzle 3 (High-Low Glyphics): Designed the top-down isometric floor plans for the tomb space, utilizing clear tracking lines and sweeping camera icons to orient the viewer. I then illustrated a dimensional column composed of four stacked, rotating cubes, animating their 360-degree rotation to show how lining up the hidden animal hieroglyphics would unlock the room key.
Puzzle 4 (Get In Line): Engineered the visual blueprint and movement parameters for a mechanical sliding tile puzzle set within the tomb track. I animated a precise logic sequence demonstrating how color-coded tiles traveled along a rigid grid to reach their designated solution spots.
Puzzle 5 (Shadows of the Past): Conceptualized and animated an atmospheric light projection challenge. I illustrated a series of obelisks casting interactive shadows, cleanly tracking how physical items scattered around the tomb needed to align to perfectly fill in matching silhouettes painted onto the wall.
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The final graphics package provided Create the Escape with a visually distinct, highly repeatable storytelling mechanism for its rollout on Peacock. By transforming complex floor plans and abstract spatial challenges into intuitive, animated blueprint walkthroughs, the sequences effectively bridged the gap between the child creators and the adult players, maximizing audience comprehension and significantly boosting the overall production value of the series.