Our first DigiCamp : Animation Magic launched in Victoria, BC last week, and was a huge hit. The kids had a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed seeing the different Wizard characters and magic spells they created. In this post I will share a bit of the story and showcase artwork from some of our camp participants. Read on…
From Concept Art to 3D Magic
“The Sock Attractor Potion” by Evan
Effect: All the socks in a 50km radius come to life and come to you.
Ingredients : White Socks, Rose Petal Essence, Phoenix Down Feather.
Method : Harvest the socks from Walmart. Place cauldron over pink flame and bring to a boil. Stir the mixture 5 times using a sock with a stick in it. The potion is ready when the vapor smells like dirty socks.
Caution: Do not use if you are wearing socks.
One of our core visions is to foster imagination and creativity in young people – to help them be creators, not just consumers of media content.
We also want to introduce them to some game development practices and artistic design principles. For example, what colors should you make a poison potion? How does a character’s story affect their design? How do you do color design work on the digital screen?
Our DigiCamps engage kids in creative concepting activities : designing a wizard on paper first, writing a story about the potion they are brewing, and getting a feel for design of smoke versus steam using chalk pastels before building them as visual effects.
Once the artistic concepting is done, then they can use an android tablet and our custom ‘Companion App’ to bring those ideas to life in 3D, add magical spells, and create video clips they can use to build their final animated movie.
Our Android App : 100% locally made
We are really proud of our Animation Magic Companion App, developed in less than a year by our hard working University co-op students, expert developer support from NoHero studios in Vancouver, and featuring the AAA quality visual effects of Alchemy VFX.
A vital part of this journey was the contribution of volunteer Unity Developer Ricardo Solis (Simon Fraser University Computer Science). Ricardo generously supported and mentored our junior coder, and importantly took the lead on one of our most popular features:
“Coming from SFU with a year of professional game dev experience, I loved the opportunity to jump in and own the end-to-end implementation of the Movie Maker feature. Working closely with the Art Director and Creative Director, I was able to take the initial concepts and turn them into a fully functional part of the app. It was incredibly rewarding to apply my development background to a high-impact feature and see it become a core part of the kids’ final animation projects.” – Ricardo Solis, Unity Developer
![](https://alchemyvfx.com/wp-content/uploads/ricardo.jpg")
“Coming from SFU with a year of professional game dev experience, I loved the opportunity to jump in and own the end-to-end implementation of the Movie Maker feature. Working closely with the Art Director and Creative Director, I was able to take the initial concepts and turn them into a fully functional part of the app. It was incredibly rewarding to apply my development background to a high-impact feature and see it become a core part of the kids’ final animation projects.” – Ricardo Solis, Unity DeveloperA unique and sophisticated part of the application is a carefully designed Visual effect system that allows the users to build their own visual effects magic from a set of elements, layers, and customization options, without all the substantial technical complexity of a game engine.
We were thrilled to see how quickly the kids got the hang of it, and how keen they were to get on with making their custom spells and potions for their characters.
The combination of Wizard designer, VFX designer and Movie maker fostered a lot creativity, and this is just the start of our development plan! The live feedback from the kids themselves has given us new ideas, and we look forward to bringing in new features later this year.
Expect the Unexpected…
We had many design options to facilitate how the kids would create, but of course, they quickly had fresh ideas we hadn’t anticipated! For example, some created an entirely black potion surface (which turned invisible because of how transparency works), while others didn’t want to apply a skin tone at all so their wizard stayed the “ghostly white” of the unlit texture. We heard requests for faceless wizards, glowing red eyes, and asking if a character could be shoeless and just wear socks (for reasons which will soon become clear).
As we complete our pilot testing, I’m sure we will get even more ideas, but the ingenuity of our participants was a true high point. They all created unique and interesting characters; I’ve picked just a couple to share here, with their permission.
Wizard Showcase : “The Sock Bandit”
Evan’s “Sock Bandit” character revealed herself on Day 1. His concept art showed a Wizard in socks, tattered pants and a magic staff where the crystal gem was replaced by, you guessed it, a sock. After Evan shared his Wizard’s backstory, we decided to sneak in some additional ‘sock’ elements to our visual effects designer, allowing him to add to his spellcasting designs. We’re curious to see who else notices the socks in future camps!
“My character is Millie Bobby Brown – the Sock Bandit. Millie was poor when she was a kid, but she had all her clothes except for socks. So, she started stealing socks and then she became a wizard that developed spells to get more socks. Millie would eat the socks or sell them on eBay. She makes sure to keep the good ones in her sock pouch, and now she goes by the Sock Bandit!” – Evan, DigiCamp participant
“My character is Millie Bobby Brown – the Sock Bandit. Millie was poor when she was a kid, but she had all her clothes except for socks. So, she started stealing socks and then she became a wizard that developed spells to get more socks. Millie would eat the socks or sell them on eBay. She makes sure to keep the good ones in her sock pouch, and now she goes by the Sock Bandit!” – Evan, DigiCamp participant
Wizard Showcase : “Run, Hide“
At the opposite end of the spectrum was a creepily powerful Wizard character created by Micah. Micah explained that his Wizard’s name “Run, Hide’ was what people would shout when this man appeared on the scene. I can see why – his Potion brew was a dark, void magic of ‘dimensional mass destruction’ that nothing can survive. Micah had a truly epic story to tell, and he inspired us to add more options for capturing video clips within the app. We hope this creates even more storytelling magic in the future.
Learn more about DigiCamp : Animation Magic
We are proud to announce our partnership with DigiBC and our participation in their DigiCamp program, allowing us to offer Animation Magic completely free of charge to a limited number of students in 2026. DigiCamps will be the premier launch of Animation Magic in BC, supporting us to bring this new DigiCamp program to communities across BC.
This opportunity is made possible thanks to a major multi-year investment by Netflix in partnership with DigiBC. The collaboration is specifically designed to strengthen B.C.’s animation and visual effects (VFX) talent pipeline.
We will be starting DigiCamps from Victoria and Vancouver Island, watch this space for more updates on future locations.
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Interested in our 2026 DigiCamps offering? Please contact us with questions or sign up for future updates.
Learn more about the DigiBC and Netflix investment here.
Read about our involvement with DigiCamps 2026 here.
Read our launch article here : Introducing Animation Magic: Cast Your First VFX Spell in 2026!