Waterwatch:
Waterbug Survey
A six-minute training video that teaches volunteers how to find, catch and identify the waterbugs living in their local creek. The bugs tell you how healthy the water is, so the video had to make tiny, wriggling creatures easy to spot and fun to learn about.
The brief
Turn a field survey into a friendly how-to.
Keep it on-brand for Waterwatch.
Make each bug easy to recognise.
What I made with AI
Sticker-style animated bugs.
Speech-bubble pop-ups.
Labels, lower thirds and title cards.
The creek food-web graphic.
The result
One consistent graphic world,
built from the brand guide,
without a separate animation team.
From brand guide
to graphics
Waterwatch’s brand guide uses cut-out, sticker-look animals with hand-drawn speech bubbles. I used that style as the reference and generated a full set of matching graphics with AI: each waterbug as its own sticker, pop-ups that name the bugs living in the stream, labels such as “Worm (tolerant)”, and the title cards. I then animated them and cut them into the live-action footage, so the graphics and the shoot feel like one piece.
From AI graphic
to finished film
Each graphic below was generated with AI in the style of the Waterwatch brand guide, then animated and placed into the edit. On the left is the graphic as it was generated; on the right, the moment it plays in the finished film.
Bugs with
something to say
Each waterbug became a cut-out sticker with its own personality and a speech bubble, so kids remember which bug is which.
Where
waterbugs live
Call-outs pop up beside the creek to show which bugs live where, as the presenter talks about them.
There are
two ways
Pop-ups introduce each step of the survey in the bugs’ own voice.
Bugsy explains
bioindicators
Bugsy introduces the big idea: waterbugs are bioindicators that tell you how healthy the creek is.
