￩ Bringing Zalak’s TEDx Talk to Life With Animation

8 May 2025 in Animation, Process, General waffle

In early 2025, we were approached by Zalak Raval – a lawyer preparing a TEDx talk on her personal journey through emotional burnout and growth. She was looking for a way to enhance her talk through animation, to help the audience connect more deeply with her message.

When Zalak got in touch about her TEDx talk, she knew she wanted to include animation, but didn’t quite know how it would work alongside her speech. She had the talk written, but no finalised plan. Just a sense that animation could help make her ideas more impactful, more memorable, and more engaging for the audience.

That’s where we came in.

Our first job was to make sense of the talk in visual terms. Director Katy Ross worked closely with Zalak to rearrange parts of the script, finding moments that could benefit from visual emphasis. We decided the animation needed to do two things:

1) To work as a standalone short film that could be shared on social media.
2) To be able to be broken into short segments to use within the TEDx talk as chapter-style headers.

We helped rework the structure of the talk to highlight key messages with clarity and impact. Our aim was to give the audience something that would stick in the mind: visuals that clarified ideas, added warmth, and supported Zalak’s words with creative storytelling.

We started with character design. Katy explored a range of sketches to capture Zalak’s energy and presence. We had a ‘pick and mix’ session – combining favourite elements from different designs to land on a final look. Thought went into every detail, from outfit to colour palette, especially knowing the animation would be shown on a dark stage backdrop.

Once the final design was in place, Billmund helped create keyframes ready for animation.

Katy worked by hand – drawing frame by frame in pencil and pen on paper, then scanning the illustrations for digital cleanup and sequencing. Animator David Connolly joined the team to help bring everything to life.

Dave had the challenging task of animating the 2D character spinning around a pole in 3D space, while staying true to Katy’s hand-drawn style. Once the visual language was established, Dave matched it seamlessly in Adobe Animate, blending his digital work with Katy’s illustrations so the whole sequence felt cohesive and fluid.

We used bubbles as a visual device to represent Zalak’s thoughts – light, changeable, and easy to follow. They gave us a way to visualise abstract ideas in a way that was engaging and easy to understand.
From start to finish, the entire piece came together in just 20 days – covering script edits, story planning, design, frame-by-frame animation, compositing, final edits and renders. With such a tight turnaround, we had to make some compromises with our adventurous ideas, which made the script work a real team effort. Background character movement was kept minimal, and aside from the pole-dancing scene, movement for Zalak’s character was kept limited too. The bubbles were a quick animation solution, but still delivered a bold, memorable ending where all the positive/helpful thoughts gathered like a sky full of stars; as if the world itself was expanding, symbolising limitless possibility.

Zalak’s Feedback:

We were so grateful for Zalak’s trust in our process and thrilled to see how the animation worked in her impressive TEDx talk. Here’s what she had to say about working with us:

“From the moment I contacted Superdoodle, I knew I was in good hands. Katy’s illustrations perfectly captured the playful and imaginative style I was after. She really listened to and captured my intentions, understood what was truly important for me to convey, provided valuable feedback through it all to turn it into an impactful and beautiful animation. Every detail was taken into account, all the while keeping me updated and engaged throughout the process to create collaboratively. I am deeply grateful for this team and attribute much of the audience interest in the speech to their brilliant animation.”

If you would like to read more about Zalak’s journey, read our blog “Making the Unconscious Conscious: Zalak Raval’s Journey from Rock Bottom to TEDx”.

Want to Add Animation to Your Talk?

If you’ve got a presentation, speech or talk that you’d like to make more dynamic and memorable, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’ve got a full plan or just an idea, we can help you shape it, visualise it, and bring it to life.

Get in touch and let’s talk.