#hoggin's work

Some progress from an upcoming Oney Plays Animation I’m currently working on.

Stephen in the woods with a guitalele

The film in its concept and graphical style was mainly inspired by the Sega Dreamcast game 'Jet Set Radio', a game where you play as a gang of rollerblading graffiti taggers in Toyko. The game is noted for being the first game to use a cel-shaded graphical style and is also well known for its funky and eclectic soundtrack, some originals created by Hideki Naganuma, and others by various artists like Jurassic 5, Guitar Vader and others.

I found a website based on the game, JetSetRadio.Live, which features music within the games ethos plus lots of videos of graffiti, extreme sports and other little artistic bits and bobs. I used the video content on the site for visual inspiration and reference, and passed the website over to my composer, Stephen Potter, for musical reference.

One of the creative decisions that was decided early on in the film's development was how the environments we're going to be handled. Naturally, I'm not good at being able to draw environments myself without a large amount of time on my hands which I just wouldn't have. Then brought forward was the idea to incorporate elements of 3D into the film.

The environments in the film were created using SketchUp, a free 3D design program that's primarily use to create architectural designs or 3D models with a bit more user friendly ease than most 3D programs. An original intention was to create super basic versions of the environments, and then sketch building details over them afterwards, but this would've made the process a bit more time consuming, so I instead opted to go with creating the environments entirely within SketchUp.

Environments where created in stages. First, referring to the original storyboard shaped how the environment needed to look. It was essentially a case of creating spaces and areas the characters would be in. Afterwards, the buildings were given some more shape, and eventually texture.

One benefit to using Sketchup was that it's on lighting, paired with the outlines that it gave, would give a good sense of the Cel-Shading style, similar to Jet Set Radio, the main inspiration to this project.

The biggest obstactle to tackle was camera movement. Sketchup allows the user to create 'Scenes', which are essential the viewpoint of the camera in the world, and then the program animates a transition between them. However the movements themselves are very static, as well as have a mind of their own which you need to find roundabout ways to manipulate. One original solution was to export a video and try to ease the timing myself, however I found out that I could export.

the animation as image sequences, which benefitted creating the animation afterwards, since the movements could be brought into Flash and animated over.  This also meant I could create faux easing, by creating long transitions then removing frames to create the slow in/slow out effect.

Billboards, graffiti and and character cameos (which all consist of friends and colleagues online) were then created and pasted into the world to bring more splashes of life to the mix. 

There are also 2 cameo creations in this, a billboard of Flyaway Lya, by James Ward (aka Oddboy18) and a large graffiti piece of Zeke & Antonio by Nik Castaneda (aka OmeletteCounty)

The character cameos are all 'billboarded' into the world to face the camera, a technique used primarily in old games where 2D prerendered graphics would be placed into the world, and would often seem a higher fidelity than the world around it. This works in favour of the toon since the characters are already 2D acting in 3D space.

Meet The Artist

Moogleh in the style of Night In The Woods