“ Mind Games” Animated Trailer
Trailer
Role: Creative Co-Director
Contributions: sound Design, storyboarding, cinematoghraphy, 2D illustration, 2D animation, 3D lighting, compositing, final editorial.
Process
Our knights were among our most attented characters and with good reason (they’re badass)…
The trickiest part were the legs of his horse. We used Duik Angela, an intuitive rigging pluging for After Effects, to create a skeleton for our illustration of the legs. This was one of the biggest learning experiences of this project, as it exposed me to the world of 2D rigging.
Our story started with the idea of creating a dynamic action sequence combing 2D and 3D mediums. Chess was a great canditate and we wanted to show the full game, but decided to cut th efinal product down to a trailer.
This is the animatic that shows the full length of time, some shots you will find familiar from the final trailer.
For this project, we wanted a more stylized look for the 2D portion, and that applied to the effects as well. But 2D stylized effects are not simple or easy and require many work-arounds.
We wanted the impact of the horse on the ground to be well illustrated. So I did what every artist does (throw random things in the blender and see how it tastes after.
My approach was to fake the dust through animating spheres and blurring them, distorting them until they look like a blob of cartoony particles.