I belong to a neat little collective of animation freelancers in Detroit called Boxfort. We were tasked with creating some animated content for this years Half Rez conference in Chicago.
Despite Half Rez’s in previous years just having short animated bumpers, we pretty much immediately decided it’d be fun to come together as a collective and create one big cohesive title sequence. We broke the project into thirds, with myself directing the first sequence, Julie Craft and Dave Holm co-directing the second, and Billy Chitkin (aka Gernge) directing the third and final sequence. Wes Slover hopped on board and came up with some killer sound design to pull the whole thing together.

Full credits:

Wesley Slover - Sound Design
Nick Parente - Creative Direction, Illustration, 2D Animation
Julie Craft - Creative Direction, 3D Design, Animation
Dave Holm - Creative Direction, Illustration, 2D Animation
Billy Chitkin - Creative Direction, 3D Design, 3D Animation
Scott Hoch - Cel Animation, Character Design, Concepting
Justin Lemmon - Illustration, Concepting, 2D Animation
Jake Williams - Illustration, 2D Animation
Anthony Maiuri - 3D Character Design
Michael Condon - Additional 3D Asset Creation

Process

Pre-production

The initial idea changed a fair amount after the boarding process. Initially I had the character making his way through a crowded platform of wacky characters before bouncing his way down the platform stairs to see a boring billboard that he would turn into a wacky tube guy. This idea was fun, but a bit overwhelming, and at the same time maybe a little mundane on the animation side.

After I had boarded it intially, Scott Hoch jumped onto the project and helped me concept a better idea for the middle part of the sequence, where the character leaps over the station platform and turns into a bunch of wacky shapes and other forms, shown on the left. I took that and boarded out a slightly tweaked idea, shown on the right.

Here’s a bunch of other doodles and ideation that Scott did.

Illustration Process

Everything for my sequence was illustrated in Procreate with the Technical brush. Justin Lemmon helped me get started by taking the rough sketch (shown below far left) and doing an awesome illustration/color study (shown middle left), which I took and created the initial styleframe (shown middle right), and ultimately turned into the final scene (shown far left).

Here’s a couple procreate timelapses of the illustration for the first two scenes. (final product on left, timelapse on right)

Animation Process

Animation for my sequence was split between AE and Rough Animator for iOS, with Scott taking on most of the cel duties.

Above is the initial animatic I made for the jump scene, to the right is a little highlight of the jumps I made, and below is a little bts of the jump workflow.