Challenge

As part of the site refresh for Appley Rotten, I wanted to create a new video to raise awareness of the brand and draw in new audiences on YouTube and across social media sites.

As the character brand was now over twenty years old, it had a lot of history to draw from and I wanted to honor that history while adding a new, modern spin on the material.

Discovery

Original video

Appley Rotten began as a one-off Flash animation on my private website in 2004, featuring a cute character with a large, apple-shaped head and a bad attitude. The character proved popular and expanded to additional videos, comics and merchandise.

With Flash no longer viable as a format for video creation, I explored alternate options for generating short animation as part of the site refresh promotion.

AI tool evaluation

Although I continued to draw all comics and brand artwork using traditional tools for digital illustration, I started exploring AI for possible integration in the creative process. The first integration was driven by the creative content itself, for Appley's first comic back after the long gap — where it seemed timely to poke fun at the proliferation of AI art online with an obviously cheap AI-generated panel.

This led to studies with production work from old product photography, including a 3D spinning model of a papercraft toy and a video test for short form video to promote the character to new audiences. The reel hit almost 2,000 impressions in a single day, prompting me to explore a longer-format video using AI.

Design

I approached the video from a real source: before Appley had ever appeared in comics, she existed as a physical doll, often alongside my cat Minou. From these references, I generated a "puppet" and stop-motion stage setting with Google Nano Banana 2 as part of pre-production. I then drew illustrations and translated them into rendered keyframes for a series of escalating vignettes between the tiny doll and a real cat, tentatively titled "The Nine Lives of Appley Rotten."

As I rendered dozens of short clips over a month, the AI frequently struggled with subtle character acting and more outlandish scenarios — but one vignette was starting to work. I reduced scope and edited the footage in Adobe Premiere into a focused animated short: "Appley Knows Kung Fu," where the small doll throws a strong punch at the bewildered cat and strides away in triumph.

Delivery

The teaser

This teaser video was the initial test for the AI-driven animation style, which proved to be a breakout hit on the later YouTube channel.

The final video

The finished video runs nearly a minute with full audio and animation. It's included on the refreshed website as a reward for finishing the game mode.

The outtakes video

Failed animation attempts were compiled into an “outtakes” video that is linked in the end card of the final video — an unexpected side benefit that escalates from slightly off to completely unhinged, and may be funnier than the original.

Results

For the final videos, viewers didn't just click — they watched nearly everything, with the breakout short form video averaging a 169.9% view rate, a clear signal that viewers were returning to rewatch. That single video accounted for over 83% of all engaged views, driving a spike that carried the entire channel's growth. The audience may be small, but their attention is exceptionally high and show promise for future videos to help drive increased awareness of the brand.