Mascot → animated Lottie
Your mascot, animated as Lottie emotes that ship inside your app.
Send one illustration. Get back a pack of looping emotes — wave,
celebrate, thumbs-up, idle — as .json and
.lottie files that play in lottie-web and lottie-ios, with a
real alpha channel, in styles hand-made vector animation can't reach:
painterly shading, soft gradients, organic secondary motion.
The honest trade, up front: a hand-animated vector Lottie of comparable complexity is 50–300 KB. These are rendered frame sequences wrapped in Lottie, so they land around 0.7–2 MB gzipped — roughly 10× the bytes, and no encoder closes that gap. What you get for it: styles a vector rig can't draw, a 48-hour turnaround instead of a contractor's fortnight, and a price with two digits in it. If your budget is bytes and your mascot is flat vector, hire a vector animator — they'll beat us on size, permanently.
Live gallery
These are playing in your browser right now.
Not video, not GIF — the actual Lottie JSON files, loaded by lottie-web from this page, on a checkerboard so you can see the transparency. Click any tile to play or pause. Every byte count below is the real file on this server.
How it works
Three steps, one human, no dashboard to learn.
Send your mascot
One image — PNG or JPG, transparent background preferred but not required — plus the emotes you want. Email or DM. No account, no upload flow, no onboarding.
We generate and gate
Each emote is generated several times over and machine-checked: loop seam, colour drift, motion jank, on-model identity. Takes that fail are re-rolled, not shipped. You never see the rejects — that filtering is the actual product.
Delivered in 48 hours
A zip of .json and .lottie files, a private
preview page like this gallery, and the four lines of code that drop
them into your app. Not instant — async, and stated plainly.
Pricing
Founding offer — the first five mascots.
- 4–6 emotes from one mascot illustration
- 512×512, 24 fps, seamless loops, alpha preserved
.json+.lottie, plus a live preview page- Delivered within 48 hours of payment
- Re-rolls on anything that doesn't look like your character
Payment first, delivery within 48 hours, stated plainly. If what comes back isn't on-model and you don't want it, you get your money back — I'd rather refund than argue.
- Same deliverable, same turnaround
- The founding price is low for velocity, not because the work is smaller
- Bigger packs and custom emote lists: ask
For scale: commissioning this from an animator runs $100–300+ per animation and takes days to weeks. That's the alternative this is priced against.
Get started
Send your mascot.
Attach the illustration and list the emotes you want. If you're not sure what to ask for, say what your app does and I'll propose a set.
The main channel. Attach the image; a reply comes back with a yes/no on whether the style will hold up, before you pay anything.
Email your mascotFAQ
The technical questions, answered straight.
Why are the files ~1 MB when Lottie is supposed to be tiny?
Because these aren't vector Lotties. Lottie is a container as well as a vector format, and what's inside these is a sequence of 121 WebP frames with alpha, wrapped in the Lottie JSON schema so it plays in the players you already ship.
That buys the styles — painterly shading, gradient fills, organic motion no bezier rig produces — and it costs bytes: 0.7 to 2 MB gzipped instead of 50–300 KB. It is a real trade, not a temporary limitation. If your bundle can't spend a megabyte, this isn't the right tool.
Which players are verified?
lottie-web — verified; use the canvas
renderer (121 image layers is a lot of DOM for the SVG renderer).
lottie-ios 4.6.1 — verified in the simulator: it renders
the frame-sequence format and decodes the embedded WebP assets, with
per-frame output essentially indistinguishable from a lossless
control, and first paint around 300 ms.
Not yet tested: Android's lottie-android, React Native, and older iOS versions (WebP decoding leans on the system decoder, so iOS 15/16 needs its own check). If you need one of those, say so before you pay and I'll test it against your file rather than guess.
What exactly do I receive?
Per emote: a .json (plain Lottie, everything embedded, no
external asset folder to wire up) and a .lottie
(dotLottie, ~25% smaller on disk). Plus a preview page like this
gallery, and a snippet for whichever player you're using.
Can I get them smaller?
Yes, with a stated cost. There's a size ladder: 512 px at 24 fps is the default because it's the smallest setting that still looks premium. 256 px roughly quarters the bytes and reads as slightly soft at hero size but is near-native for a chat-sticker-sized element. Shorter loops cut proportionally. Dropping below 24 fps was tried and rejected — it reads as a flipbook. Ask for a rung and you'll get it.
Why not just ship a GIF or an MP4?
GIF caps at 256 colours with one-bit transparency — a soft-edged mascot gets a jagged halo over any background that isn't the one it was matted onto. MP4 has no alpha at all, so it can't sit over your UI. These files keep a full feathered alpha channel and composite over anything, which is what an in-app emote actually needs.
What styles work best?
Characters with a clear silhouette and a readable palette: flat vector mascots, 3D-render-style characters, hand-drawn and painterly illustration, soft-gradient blobs. What struggles: very fine detail and small text, which lose definition at 512 px, and anything whose appeal depends on razor-crisp geometric edges.
Send the image before paying — a straight answer on whether your style holds up is free.
Who's behind this?
One developer in Queensland, Australia, running it as a sole trader. It's new — there is no customer list to show you and this page isn't going to pretend otherwise. What there is: the clips above, which you can right-click, download, and load into your own player before you spend a cent.